


I know nothing else, I know only this

by laallomri



Series: season 5 au [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Fluff, M/M, Pining, Rating for Language, Season 3, charles boyle voice: hunk is so strong but so gentle, like an enormous muscular ellen degeneres, season 4, season 5, this is really self indulgent lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-20 02:21:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14250981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laallomri/pseuds/laallomri
Summary: “I feel like I’m in a bad teen movie,” Keith says as they creep down the hallway of the base.“Well, we are sneaking out,” Lance says, “and we’re lying about where you’re gonna be the next few hours. If we really wanted to be accurate I’d have thrown pebbles at your window and you’d have climbed down a tree.” He’s walking a little ahead of Keith, so he glances back at him, frowning. “If Kolivan’s in charge of the base, does this make him your dad in this scenario?”“I think he’s too old for that,” Keith says. They round a corner, tiptoe down another hallway. “Maybe he’s the grandpa.”In which Keith finds time in the midst of defending the universe to live out some of the tropes of a corny teenage romance.





	I know nothing else, I know only this

**Author's Note:**

> you: will this author ever stop changing lance’s eyes to be brown?  
> me: n e v e r
> 
> shoutout to @saltylances for putting up with me sending her a zillion messages about this and to @leggylance for helping with the letter at the end
> 
> this was originally meant for the minibang hosted by @safeklancewriters. unfortunately I couldn’t get it done on time. but you should all go follow that blog they’re cool and they do fic recs and challenges and events and stuff
> 
> warnings: sensory overload, description/discussion of it and anxiety-related experiences afterward
> 
> title is from Tujh Mein Rab Dikhta Hai, a song from the movie Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi
> 
> EDIT (28/05/2018): I was going through old reblogs and tags and realized the keith fruit ninja concept came from [this post](http://royalbee.tumblr.com/post/167922843227/lance-oh-man-i-wish-i-had-a-knife-to-cut-up-this/) by @royalbee on tumblr. I sincerely apologize for not crediting it originally, I completely forgot it came from this post and should have written it down sooner to remind myself

It’s a week after Keith becomes black paladin, a week after he starts spending more time piloting the black lion than he does looking for the person who used to pilot it. He still searches sometimes, tries to get up earlier or stay up later to take the lion out to look for Shiro, but he’s still no nearer to finding him.  
  
He’s lying on his back on the couch, pretending to read a book Coran had lent him while actually worrying about how little time he’s spent lately looking for Shiro. Lance is sprawled vertically on the same side of the couch as Keith, close enough that if Keith stretched out his leg he could probably poke Lance’s side with his foot.  
  
For a few minutes everyone is quiet, absorbed in their activity or their thoughts, and then Lance speaks, his voice bright and sudden in the silence.  
  
“Princess,” he says, as he tosses the Altean equivalent of a stress ball from one hand to the other, “who was your first kiss?”  
  
Keith looks over at Allura. She’s sitting cross-legged on the opposite side of the couch, braiding one of Hunk’s headbands into her hair. Hunk and Pidge are on the floor, muttering as they tinker with a gadget that occasionally emits vaguely concerning sounds. The mice run around the gadget, squeaking and jumping in response to the weird noises.  
  
Allura’s eyes are narrowed as she looks at Lance.  
  
“Why do you ask?” she says.  
  
“It’s not a line,” he says, and Keith can hear the sincerity in his voice. “I’m not trying to flirt, I promise. I’m just curious.”  
  
Keith looks at Lance again. He’s still tossing the stress ball from one hand to the other, back and forth, back and forth. It’s soothing, rhythmic, so much so that Keith almost misses what Allura says.  
  
“Oh.” The suspicion in her voice vanishes. “Well, my first kiss was with Joti Muzan when I was fifteen and Garva Rahal when I was sixteen.”  
  
Lance’s brow furrows. The stress ball lands in one palm but he doesn’t toss it again. It bothers Keith; he wants to poke Lance with his foot to get him to toss the ball again, but it turns out Lance isn’t close enough for that after all, and Keith thinks it’d look weird if he scooted down the couch or sat up just to prod Lance into tossing a stress ball.  
  
In fact—it wouldn’t just look weird, it _would_ be weird. Keith frowns at himself and looks back at his book.  
  
“How can you have two first kisses?” Lance asks. “That literally contradicts the definition of a first kiss.”  
  
“Joti was my first kiss with a nonbinary person,” Allura explains, “and Garva was my first kiss with a boy.”  
  
“Ohhhh,” Lance says. He goes back to tossing the stress ball. “I got it.” He sounds thoughtful. “That’s a cool way of counting first kisses. I hadn’t even thought of that.”  
  
“It’s how most Alteans count first kisses if they are attracted to more than one gender,” Allura says.  
  
“Cool,” Lance says. “I should do that too. Like, Rosa Santiago when I was fifteen and Hunk when I was fourteen.”  
  
Keith looks up from his book so fast he gets a crick in his neck.  
  
“ _Hunk_?” Pidge says, finally distracted from her gadget. She glances at Hunk, as if for confirmation. “Really?”  
  
Hunk nods, though he doesn’t look up from the machine. It’s incredible to Keith that he could be so cavalier about this, because if he had ever kissed Lance he would be nowhere near as—  
  
( _shut the fuck up_ , whispers an angry part of his mind. _god, you’re so fucking embarrassing, why are you like this_ —)  
  
Keith clears his throat.  
  
“Was it—” Dammit, why does he sound so nervous? It’s not a big deal, it’s not, it’s just the news that Lance and Hunk kissed once, or twice, or multiple times, or a number that doesn’t matter because it’s not a big deal, really it’s not—but if it’s not then why is Keith’s stomach twisting? “Were you two—was it just a friend thing?”  
  
“Yeah,” Hunk says absently, still so utterly unconcerned with the conversation that he’s more focused on shooing Platt away from poking his nose into a machine part. “We decided we wanted to see what kissing was like and since we were friends we thought we’d just kiss each other.”  
  
“Cause then it doesn’t matter if it’s bad,” Lance adds. “We’re friends so we don’t really care. Though that wasn’t really relevant cause Hunk is a fantastic kisser.”  
  
(Keith’s stomach is twisting and twisting and twisting and there’s something cold and kind of panicky in his chest—)  
  
“Aw, Lance.” At last Hunk looks up, beaming and blushing in equal measure. “You’re a fantastic kisser too, buddy.”  
  
(—and now there’s something hot and longing amidst the cold panicky twisting and Keith is—very confused—because Lance kissing someone else is horrible but Lance kissing _him_ is—)  
  
( _shut the fuck up_ , his mind says again, rolling its eyes. _you’re so pathetic, damn_ )  
  
Keith turns his attention to his book again, planning on pretending to read until the bewildering blend of emotions in him has settled, but then Lance is asking him a question.  
  
“What about you?” he asks, and he pauses tossing the stress ball long enough to reach over and nudge Keith’s foot, shooting him a cheeky grin.  
  
Keith blinks. “What?”  
  
“Your first kiss. Who was the lucky guy?”  
  
(—and now there’s something else under the already overwhelming feelings within him, something else hot, though this time it’s the heat of embarrassment, of self-consciousness—)  
  
“Uh.” Keith stares straight ahead at the book propped up on his stomach, takes in the phrase _quest to slay the Asmaan dragon!_ without really comprehending it. He thanks whoever made Altean books for the fact that the cover is big enough to hide most of his now burning face from Lance. “There’s not—I haven’t—that hasn’t been a thing yet.”  
  
He internally cringes ( _that hasn’t been a thing yet_ , what the fuck kind of sentence is that) and waits for the others to make fun of him, tries to come up with something to say in his defense, something like _I never liked anyone like that_ or _I didn’t really have time for that kind of thing_ —  
  
But Lance just says, “Oh, okay. Cool.”  
  
Keith waits for some kind of follow up, for the catch, because it seems peculiar that Lance would just drop the subject, but there’s nothing. Lance goes on to ask Pidge if she’s had her first kiss (she has not, to which Lance replies by saying he’s not surprised cause she’s practically an infant, to which Pidge replies by telling Platt to jump onto the couch and bite Lance’s finger, to which Lance replies by reminding Platt of all the times he so graciously fed him, to which Platt responds by toppling onto his back and feigning sleep to avoid having to make a decision). Keith takes a breath of relief, glad he was able to avoid having to defend his lack of experience.  
  
Except—Hunk is nosy. He’s a fantastic friend and paladin and engineer and cook but he’s also fantastically _nosy_ and kind of a gossip and the most intuitive motherfucker Keith has ever met and he’s waggling his eyebrows at Keith and pointedly looking at Lance as he and Pidge try to convince the mice to battle on their behalf while Allura giggles at their antics and Keith can feel his face heating up again and he’s trying to figure out a way to tell Hunk to shut the fuck up without anyone else noticing when—  
  
“Sooooo,” Hunk says, stretching out the sound with a suggestive air, “is there a special reason you haven’t had your first kiss yet?”  
  
(he’s going to kill him Keith is going to _kill him_ Keith is going to run him through with his fucking bayard—)  
  
“No,” he says curtly, and he’s glad his voice is even. He remains fixated on his book. Belatedly he realizes he hasn’t turned a page in several minutes; he does so to keep up the ruse. “There isn’t.”  
  
“Really?” There’s an air of faux surprise now. “I thought maybe you were waiting for someone in particular.”  
  
(no not his bayard the bayard is too merciful Keith is going to toss him out of the airlock and blast him with his lion—)  
  
“No,” Keith says again, through gritted teeth. “I’m not.”  
  
He thinks Lance glances over at him, but he isn’t sure because he’s still glaring at his book.  
  
“Then you should try it out with someone!” Hunk says, and even though he says it like the idea has just occurred to him Keith can tell that it’s deliberate and he knows that his face is probably the color of a tomato and he just really wishes Hunk would shut up because even if it weren’t for Lance’s presence the real reason he hasn’t kissed anyone yet is horribly, terribly, catastrophically embarrassing. “I’m sure there’s plenty of guys who’d be happy to take up the offer—”  
  
“I’m fine, thanks,” Keith interrupts.  
  
“Okay, but—”  
  
“I’m _fine_.”  
  
“Aw, come on, don’t you at least want to try—”  
  
This time it’s Lance’s voice cuts across him. “Hunk.”  
  
Keith blinks at Lance overtop his book, surprised.  
  
Lance’s voice is kind but firm. “Leave him alone,” he says. “I get that it’s your personal mission to make sure everyone’s happy but this is clearly not making Keith happy so maybe let’s ease up a bit, okay?”  
  
Pidge and Allura and the mice all look at Lance. Hunk looks at Lance, too, and Keith can tell there’s a conversation there that no one else is hearing, something only friends of their years and closeness could have with just expressions. Whatever it is, it makes Hunk look sheepish.  
  
“You’re right,” he says, and smiles apologetically at Keith. “Sorry, man.”  
  
“It’s okay,” Keith says, and then Lance goes back to persuading the mice to fight Pidge in honorable combat on his behalf and Pidge is back to presenting her list of reasons why they should ally with her and not Lance in this noble cause and Allura is back to laughing at him and braiding her hair and Hunk is back to tinkering with the gadget.  
  
And Keith is back to reading his book—or pretending to read his book, while actually replaying the last few minutes in his head, that same odd perplexing mix of emotions churning in his gut at the fact that Lance defended him.

.^.  
  
It doesn’t occur to Keith until the next day that he never thanked Lance for stepping in when Hunk had been teasing him. He thinks he ought to, especially since Lance has been doing so much for him lately, but he doesn’t really know how to go about it. How do you casually bring that up?  
  
_Hey remember that really uncomfortable conversation about first kisses well guess what I was ready to die the entire time because I’m pathetic so I appreciate you telling Hunk to stop making fun of me_.  
  
Keith snorts as he takes a sip of water. Yeah. That would not be awkward whatsoever.  
  
“What’s so funny?” Lance asks, coming into the kitchen and heading straight for the Altean fridge.  
  
Keith sets the cup down on the counter. “Nothing,” he says, then, to prevent further questions, “It’s from a long time ago.”  
  
“Cool.” Lance takes out a silver packet and hoists himself up onto the counter beside Keith. “Sometimes I remember vines or memes and I laugh out loud, even if I’m alone. Hunk thinks it’s weird.”  
  
“It is weird,” Keith agrees.  
  
“It is _not_ ,” Lance protests, opening the packet. There’s some kind of sandwich inside, half eaten; he lifts it out, takes a bite, then says through a full mouth, “If you remembered”—he pauses, chews, swallows, then says in a weird voice—“‘I love you, biiiitch. I ain’t never gonna stop loving you… _bitch_ ’”—his voice returns to normal—“then you would laugh out loud too.”  
  
Keith crinkles his nose as Lance takes another bite of sandwich.  
  
“What is that from?” he asks.  
  
“This?” Lance waves the sandwich in the air. A piece of something purple falls out and onto the floor with a splat. Lance watches it go with an expression of mild dismay; a second later Chuchule darts out from a tiny hole in the bottom kitchen cabinet, snatches up the purple piece, then disappears into the hole again. “This is a sandwich made with ingredients from the Olkarion forest. Allura and me got them after our last visit and we made a ton of these for future lunches cause apparently Olkarion food doesn’t go bad for a really long time.”  
  
“I know,” Keith reminds him, a little amused. “I was here for all of that, remember? You tossed the pink vegetables and made me chop them midair with my bayard.”  
  
“Oh yeah,” Lance says, through another mouthful of sandwich. “That was fun, it was like playing real life fruit ninja.” He frowns. “Wait, then what were you asking about?”  
  
“The thing you quoted,” Keith clarifies. “The bitch thing.”  
  
Lance drops the sandwich. Thankfully it lands in the silver packet in his lap, though it teeters precariously. Chuchule darts back out from the hole, clearly eyeing the sandwich.  
  
“Keith,” Lance says, and his tone is so serious Keith thinks for a moment that he might have offended him with the question, “you don’t know where that’s from?”  
  
“Uh.” Keith is almost afraid to answer. “No?”  
  
Lance’s voice is almost deafening. “ _What_?” he shouts. “ _How_ can you not _know_ —”  
  
“I lived in the middle of the desert for a year!” Keith says defensively. “It’s not like I kept up with whatever people were tweeting about.”  
  
“Tweeting—” Lance breaks off, closes his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose. He takes a deep breath, opens his eyes again. “ _Tweeting_. You think this is a Twitter thing? You think this _masterpiece_ , this quote of Shakespearian levels of emotion and drama, came from fucking _Twitter_?”  
  
“Uh. Yes?”  
  
“ _Keith_!” Lance exclaims, “It’s from a _vine_ , you uncultured _ass_!” and he looks so outraged and he sounds so indignant and he has a bit of orange sauce at the corner of his mouth and he’s so adorably dumb and Keith can’t help himself.  
  
He tries to suppress his laughter at first, since this seems to matter so much to Lance, but the more he tries not to laugh the harder it gets to not do so, and eventually he gives in. Lance glares at him at first, then a grin of his own tugs at the corner of his mouth, and within a few seconds he’s laughing too.  
  
“Okay,” he admits, once they’ve both calmed down. “Maybe that was an overreaction. _Maybe_.”  
  
“You’re so dumb,” Keith says, and he hears the words come out of his mouth as if said by another person, hears how soft and fond they sound. Part of him wants to correct it, wants to add something to make it less affectionate, but the moment passes, and Lance doesn’t even seem to have noticed.  
  
Instead he’s back to eating his sandwich, though he breaks off a little piece of the pseudo-bread and some of the filling and drops it in front of a gleeful Chuchule, who drags the food into the hole in the cupboard.  
  
For a few minutes they sit in silence as Lance eats and Keith pretends to drink from his cup of water. He had emptied it a while ago but he doesn’t want to leave; he likes being here with Lance, sitting next to him on a kitchen counter, like they’re two teenagers disregarding one of their mom’s kitchen rules instead of soldiers fighting an intergalactic war.  
  
(he also likes having an excuse to peek at Lance every so often, to look at his curly hair and his broad shoulders and imagine—)  
  
( _no_ , says one part of his mind, very firmly. _cease and desist_ )  
  
( _but_ , says the other part, soft and intriguing, _don’t you wonder sometimes_ —)  
  
( _No_ )  
  
(— _if your glove would catch on the curls_ —)  
  
( _NO_ )  
  
(— _if you would be able to feel the muscles on his back_ —)  
  
( _shut UP_ , the first part of his mind roars, and Keith has to clasp his hands in his lap to keep from doing something stupid, like touching Lance’s shoulder or catching Lance’s hand in his own or even pressing his hands to his cheeks because he can tell they’re heating up and he’s worried Lance might notice)  
  
“…first try?”  
  
Keith blinks. “What?”  
  
Lance is holding the crumpled up sandwich packet in one hand. “Do you think I can land this in the trash bin on the first try?”  
  
Keith looks across the kitchen. It’s not far—but the bin is fairly small—but Lance is a fantastic shot—but Keith likes making fun of him—so he says, “No.”  
  
Lance makes an indignant noise. “Rude,” he says, then looks at the trash bin, closes one eye, and yells “KOBE!”  
  
He tosses the crumpled up packet. It sails through the air in a perfect arc, and then—  
  
“HA!”  
  
Lance jumps off the counter, spins to face Keith, points triumphantly at him, then does some kind of dance where he’s holding his fists close to his chest and rotating from side to side, lifting each foot in turn.  
  
“What—” Keith breaks off, laughing. “What the hell are you doing?”  
  
“My victory dance,” Lance says unashamedly. He switches to a horrible imitation of a disco move. “I gotta lord it over you when I win.”  
  
He spins around in place, flicks out his hoodie like a cape, puts up the hood, pops his collar, then drops the hood back down. It’s dumb and dorky and the worst dance Keith has ever seen and he can’t stop laughing, especially when Lance pretends to slide on a pair of sunglasses and tries to moonwalk in front of him.  
  
Keith isn’t sure how long Lance goes on for—long enough that his belly hurts from laughing—but eventually he does one final spin, then pretends to remove his sunglasses and does a deep bow.  
  
“Thank you,” he says, his voice pitched absurdly deep. “Thank you very much.”  
  
“You’re so fucking dumb,” Keith says again, and again he hears it as if it’s spoken by someone else, hears the fondness in it, hears it gasped through lingering laughter. He sees Lance’s wide smile, sees the fondness in it too, and suddenly the laugh-induced ache in Keith’s stomach is replaced by butterflies.  
  
“You just don’t appreciate good dancing,” Lance says primly. He leans his hip against the counter. He’s facing Keith and since Keith is still sitting on the counter he’s taller than Lance for once and for a second he has the mad urge to lean down and touch his nose to Lance’s. “That was professional-grade choreography.”  
  
For a long beat they just look at each other, and Lance’s smile is still fond, and his eyes are dark, and it feels oddly intimate to look him straight in the eyes and the butterflies in Keith’s stomach multiply, flutter around faster, frantic and furious—  
  
Lance looks down at his feet, rubs the back of his neck, looks off to the side at the island in the middle of the kitchen. It occurs to Keith that the moment was as weird for Lance as it had been for him, and that makes him feel brave—braver, anyway—and before he knows it he’s opening his mouth.  
  
“Hey.”  
  
Lance meets his gaze once more, though it doesn’t feel as intense this time. “Yeah?”  
  
Now that he’s looking at him Keith wants to drop the whole thing and run out of the kitchen, but he’s already committed and he can’t think of anything else to say, so he says, too quickly, “Thanks for yesterday.”  
  
Lance’s brow furrows. “What?”  
  
“When—when Hunk was bothering me,” Keith clarifies. He can feel embarrassment creeping up his spine, though he doesn’t know if it’s from the memory or from how dumb it feels to bring it up again now. “About first kisses.”  
  
“Oh!” Lance’s expression clears. “Yeah, man, no problem. You know he didn’t mean to make you feel bad, right? He just wants you to have the full cheesy romantic teenage experience.”  
  
“I know.” Keith hesitates, then says, still talking too quickly, “Is it weird that I haven’t?”  
  
Lance blinks.  
  
“That I haven’t had the—the—what you said.” Keith wishes the floor would open up and swallow him in. “The cheesy teenage crap.”  
  
Lance shrugs. “Nah. Everyone does that kind of stuff at their own pace. My brother Marco didn’t get a girlfriend until he was in college. And I know plenty of people who didn’t have a serious relationship until they were well into their twenties. Or even their first kiss.”  
  
“Oh.” Relief washes over him. “Okay.”  
  
“Why do you ask?” Lance asks. “Does it bother you?”  
  
“No, I just—I wondered if it was weird.”  
  
Lance shrugs again. “It’s not a big deal. Though I am kinda surprised.”  
  
That gives Keith pause. “What? Why?”  
  
“There were at least four people in our class who had a crush on you back at the Garrison,” Lance says.  
  
This is news to Keith. “There were?”  
  
“Yeah, man.” Lance regards him curiously. “Did you really not notice?”  
  
Keith shakes his head.  
  
“Huh.” Lance looks thoughtful. “So I guess none of them asked you out. I wish I’d known that.”  
  
They’re both quiet for a moment after that, and it feels like Keith’s missing something, like Lance’s expression and his words don’t quite match, like there’s something Keith would notice if he were better at understanding this kind of thing. But all he can do it sit here and wait for Lance to say something else and deal with this annoying frustrating puzzle in his gut.  
  
“Anyway.” Lance smacks the counter with his palm. “Enough small talk. I gotta get going, I promised Red I’d clean his interior today.”  
  
He starts to walk out of the kitchen, but then Keith’s mouth does that thing again where it opens and pushes words out without him wanting it to, and he hears himself say, “But is it stupid to wait?”  
  
Lance stops in the doorway. He turns to face him.  
  
“Wait?” he repeats.  
  
“Y-yeah,” Keith stammers. His face is burning and his fists are clenched and he wants to stop talking but he can’t stop, he can’t stop talking, he can’t— “Is it stupid to wait for it to mean something? Cause it seems like most people don’t really care that much but I kind of—I sort of—I don’t know, I wouldn’t want it to just be a casual thing.”  
  
When he’s done he realizes he’s forgotten to breathe the last minute or so; he takes a strangled half breath and feels his face burn hotter, because this is so fucking pathetic, Lance probably can’t even tell what the fuck he’s talking about—  
  
Lance is just staring at him, his expression strangely unreadable.  
  
“Never mind,” Keith says. He hops off the counter, takes his cup over to the sink. “Never mind, that was a stupid question, forget it—”  
  
“It’s not stupid,” Lance says, and Keith can hear the smile in his voice before he turns around to see it, and fuck he doesn’t think he’s ever been so red in his life he just wants to throw himself out of the fucking airlock and never speak to anyone ever again—  
  
He crosses his arms over his chest and glares at Lance.  
  
“Don’t make fun of me,” he says, scowling. “This isn’t funny.”  
  
“I’m not making fun of you,” Lance assures him, and now that Keith takes a second look he can see that Lance’s smile is crinkly-eyed, the way it is when he’s being perfectly genuine. He relaxes a little, though he keeps his arms crossed. “I was just surprised. You don’t seem like the kind of guy who cares that much about first kisses.”  
  
Panic fills Keith. “I’m not—no—it’s not like—”  
  
“It’s okay, man, calm down,” Lance says, chuckling. “Don’t freak out. I’m the same as you! Why do you think my first kiss was with Hunk? I didn’t want it to be with someone I barely knew after a boring date. I wanted it to be my best friend as we lay on the roof of his house and looked at stars.”  
  
Part of Keith is still mortified at this conversation, but the other part of him is traitorously intrigued, because stargazing as a lead-in to his first kiss is maybe possibly perhaps something he’s thought about. Just once. Or twice. Or three or four times, maybe.  
  
“Oh” is all Keith says.  
  
“It’s not weird or stupid to want it to be special,” Lance says. “Okay?”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
“I really gotta go clean Red,” Lance says, “so are you good?”  
  
Keith nods.  
  
“Cool,” Lance says, backing away into the hallway, “I’ll see you around,” and then, right before he’s out of sight: “And for the record, I hope you get your big romantic first kiss. Everyone deserves one.”  
  
He leaves before Keith can respond. Keith watches the empty space where he had been standing, thinks of his crinkly smile when he had realized what Keith was saying, thinks of the understanding in his brown eyes, thinks of how most people would probably have teased Keith mercilessly for admitting such a thing.  
  
_I hope you get your big romantic first kiss_.  
  
( _yeah_ , says Keith’s mind, and for once both parts of it are in agreement, embarrassed and hopeful. _I hope so too_.)

.^.  
  
A week later they go to a planet called Azadi, which has been occupied by the Galra for more than a thousand years. Such a span of time works in Voltron’s favor; the Galra viceroy and his lackeys have gotten lazy on Azadi and spend most of their time accumulating wealth and putting on absurd displays of power (when the castle ship arrives the viceroy is making his men parade around the capital in full armor and yelling chants that end in puns so bad even Pidge cringes).  
  
Between this and their timing—the guns carried by the soldiers in the parade aren’t functional; all they do is shoot out purple streamers emblazoned with the viceroy’s face—the paladins are able to dismantle Galra rule on Azadi with surprising swiftness. They don’t even have to form Voltron; Lance comes up with a way for him and Allura to cover for Pidge so she can evacuate innocent Azadians, while Hunk and Keith smash apart the Galra structures.  
  
The fight is over within a couple of hours; the viceroy and his men leave in a flurry of hastily rounded-up Galra ships, and the Azadian leader throws all six of his limbs out with glee as the lions land in a circle around the palace.  
  
“Thank you!” he says. Even with the translators Keith can hear the clicking sounds of the Azadian language. “We are most grateful for your help, brave paladins!”  
  
“All in a day’s work,” Lance says, with a wink and a finger gun.  
  
The Azadian leader looks bewildered. For a second Keith is worried he might be offended, but then the leader just mimics Lance’s finger gun with one of his limbs and winks one of his three eyes back.  
  
Pidge and Lance both laugh. Allura and Hunk, ever the diplomats, manage to hide their smiles. Keith crosses his arms and hopes his own smile isn’t as dopey as he’s afraid it might be.  
  
“We will have a celebration tonight to mark the first day of our freedom,” the Azadian leader goes on. “We hope most sincerely that you will attend.”  
  
“Of course,” Allura says. “It would be our honor.”

.^.  
  
Hunk and Allura take care of any further diplomatic negotiations; they tell Lance and Pidge and Keith that they are free to do what they please until the party. Pidge immediately sets off to interrogate the Azadian tech experts about their technology and Lance gets caught up talking to a gaggle of excited Azadians about Voltron’s past adventures. Keith hovers for a while, uncertain and out of place, then decides to go explore the Azadian palace.  
  
He walks around for a while, runs into a couple of Azadians and stammers through a few minutes of polite conversation (one of them is a child and keeps asking him questions about how fast the lions can go and calling him Mr Black Paladin Sir, which is oddly endearing). He goes up a few flights of stairs, through a heavily tapestried hallway, and finds himself in front of a pair of golden double doors, so big he has to look up to see the top of them.  
  
He wonders if he maybe ought to turn around and go somewhere else—he has a feeling Hunk and Allura would be appalled at him going into an unknown room in their host’s palace, alone and uninvited—but according to the watch on the screen of his armor he still has an hour before the celebration starts, and he’s kind of tired of walking around. He pushes open one of the doors, goes inside, then looks up and gapes.  
  
It’s a library. A humongous library, three storeys tall, with dozens of rows of bookcases that tower above Keith’s head. The floor-to-ceiling windows on the back wall let in a dazzling amount of sunlight, and there are huge round cushions scattered about the floor, presumably for sitting on while reading. Best of all, there doesn’t seem to be anyone else here, which means that Keith has this whole space to himself.  
  
He looks round to check for sure that no one else is in the room, then hugs himself with delight.  
  
( _you’re so fucking dumb_ , says one part of his brain, rolling its eyes)  
  
( _shut up_ , says the other part. _we haven’t been to a real library in months, we deserve to be excited_ )  
  
Keith takes in the sight of the library for another second, then sets off to find something to read. He scans each of the signs above the bookcases with the translator on his armor, either oohing or making a face at the results: science fiction (good), fantasy (good), cookbooks (eh), westerns (those exist here too?), realistic fiction (eh), romance—  
  
Keith pauses.  
  
_Romance_.  
  
He looks around one more time even though he knows no one else is here, then slowly inches his way back to the romance row.  
  
A couple weeks after leaving earth he had asked Coran if there was anything to read on the castle ship. Coran had shown him the tiny library tucked away in a corner of the castle ship, apologizing for how scarce it was (“most people living in the castle ship read on tablets,” he explained, “since it’s more convenient to carry than a box full of books”). Keith had torn through the entirety of the library within a month, though he had never taken any of the romances, no matter how much the tale of Malik and Josef and their rival Altean cupcake businesses intrigued him. He was pretty sure he could smuggle the romances to his room and back without being caught, but he was worried someone might notice that they had been removed and replaced, and might trace them back to him.  
  
It’s a dumb concern, and he knows it, but he’s too embarrassed to risk it.  
  
But here—here no one would know. If he picked something short enough and reads fast enough he could probably finish it before the celebration and no one would be the wiser.  
  
Keith skims over the books lining the shelves, the translator scanning and flashing the titles in quick succession: _Only The Sun Rises, Sweet Treasure, Kaleb and Hammad, The Ring of Love, Yarma and Magdalene_. After a few minutes he comes across _The Prince And His Guard: An Altean Romance_.  
  
He stops. It’s not very long—it looks to be around one hundred and fifty pages—and he remembers Coran telling him once that Alteans usually wrote romances with happy endings. He pulls the book out from the shelf with only a flicker of self-consciousness, then goes out of the row to sprawl on one of the huge round cushions to read.

.^.  
  
_Prince Gayan peeked up at Yaffral through his lashes. Yaffral was always handsome, but he looked even more so like this, illuminated by the moonlight and surrounded by sweet-smelling juniberries. Prince Gayan felt his heart a skip a beat. He so longed to tell Yaffral how he felt, but he was frightened. What if he did not feel the same way and turned him down? Or worse, what if he did not feel the same way but pretended to? Prince Gayan did not want Yaffral to accept his love out of a sense of duty._  
  
“Tell him, you idiot,” Keith mutters. He rolls over so he’s lying on his stomach, the edge of the book tucked between his chin and the cushion so he can angle the translator screen at the page more easily. “He fucking adores you, why can’t you see that? You’re so dense.”  
  
_You must take the leap, Prince Gayan told himself. Surely you have not been imagining all the soft looks he has sent your way. Remember how tenderly he spoke to you when you felt you were not worthy of the responsibility the king bestowed upon you. Surely he must like you, at least a little!_  
  
_He reached out and touched Yaffral’s arm. “I must tell you something,” he said. He was relieved his voice did not betray the nervousness he felt. “I have been wanting to tell you for some time, but I fear it will change things between us and I do not want to lose your friendship.”_  
  
_Yaffral’s eyes were kind, as they always were. “You can tell me anything,” he said, very softly. “I will always be your friend, Your Highness. Your happiness is my only wish.”_  
  
Keith sighs. What a nice thing to say to someone.  
  
_“But what if my happiness causes you discomfort,” Prince Gayan asked, “or pain?”_  
  
_“It could never,” Yaffral said. “A single smile from you would banish a lifetime’s worth of agony.”_  
  
“OH MY GOD,” Keith explodes, pounding his fist on the page. “JUST CONFESS ALREADY YOU FUCKING—”  
  
The door bursts open. Keith jumps off the cushion; the movement jolts the book, causing it to fly into the air and land, page-down, onto the floor a few feet away. His translator screen vanishes as he scrambles to his feet and faces the intruder.  
  
Hunk stares back at him.  
  
“Uh,” he says, after a few uncomfortable seconds of silence, “are you okay? You jumped like four feet into the air.”  
  
“I’m fine!” Keith says, too quickly and too loudly. “I was just, um, I was just reading. Or—” He glances at the book, at the cover with its illustration of two entwined hands. “Not—not reading, just, um, just looking. Just—yeah.”  
  
His face is burning and his palms are sweating and he’s just remembered that Hunk’s been studying Altean recently so he can help Allura more with diplomatic events and _fuck_ he probably can see the title of the book from here and he can probably understand it without a translator and Keith’s entire life and reputation is ruined, it’s fucking _ruined_ —  
  
Hunk’s eyes go from the book, to Keith, back to the book, back to Keith. Keith tries his best to stand still and keep his gaze on Hunk, though he’s overcome with the overwhelming urge to cross his arms, or kick the book under the cushion, or run out of the library and down to the Black Lion and ask him to just blast him dead before his mortification kills him.  
  
“Sure,” Hunk says finally. “I was looking for you cause the party’s about to start and since we’re paladins we have to be there on time.”  
  
“Okay,” Keith says. He isn’t sure if Hunk hadn’t understood, or if he had and he’s just cutting Keith some slack. Either way, he’ll take it. “Um. Lead the way, I guess.”  
  
“Sure,” Hunk says again, and without another word he turns and goes back down the hallway.  
  
Keith glances at the book, a bit longingly—he’d been so close to the best part!—then hurries out of the library after Hunk.

.^.  
  
They leave Azadi the next morning, after a long speech by Allura and Hunk about the spirit of freedom and the glorious alliance between Voltron and planets like these and other boring repetitive stuff Keith has heard a hundred times. Keith spends most of the first couple of hours back in space on the training deck, then goes to the lounge to take a nap on one of the couches.  
  
He’s awoken an hour later by something hitting him square on the forehead.  
  
“What the fuck,” he says hoarsely, sitting up and squinting in the direction the object had come from. He sees Hunk sitting on the couch across from him, holding his hands up to his mouth.  
  
“Whoops, sorry,” he says sheepishly. “I meant to throw it next to your head, not on it. My bad.”  
  
Keith rubs his forehead, then looks down at the object, which had fallen to the floor. A cover with two entwined hands and familiar Altean script greets him.  
  
“What?” Keith picks up the book and skims through it. It’s the same one he’d been reading. He looks at Hunk, too astonished to be embarrassed. “How did you—when—”  
  
“I went back during the party and stole it,” Hunk says.  
  
“You _stole_ it?” Keith repeats.  
  
“Well.” Hunk scratches the side of his neck. “Yes? I mean, I know it’s like, a library, but it’s not really a lending library. And I thought we could always return it when we visit again. Which, you know, we will. At some point. Probably. Hopefully.” He clasps his hands in his lap. “Anyway, I read it last night and it’s really good! I can see why you were so invested in it.”  
  
“That’s not—I wasn’t—I’m not _invested_ —” Keith splutters, but Hunk just laughs.  
  
“Nah, dude, I heard you yelling when I came into the library,” he says, and a part of Keith shrivels up at being caught. “It’s okay, though! It was a super cute story and I was mad at Prince Gayan too. He took way too long to tell Yaffral how he feels.” Hunk’s voice turns sly. “Sort of like someone else we know.”  
  
Keith pointedly ignores his last sentence.  
  
“Allura’s read it too,” Hunk goes on, but before he can continue Keith chokes.  
  
“Allura knows?” he demands. “You _told_ her?”  
  
“It’s an Altean romance!” Hunk says defensively. “I thought she might have read it so I asked her about it.”  
  
“Does she know I was reading it too?”  
  
Hunk hesitates, then says, not meeting Keith’s gaze, “…No.”  
  
Keith covers his face with the book and groans.  
  
“I’m a gossip, okay?” Hunk says. “You know that already. This shouldn’t be a surprise to you.”  
  
Keith groans again, louder this time.  
  
“Look, she didn’t make fun of you at all,” Hunk continues, then amends, “Well, she made fun of you a bit—”  
  
More groaning.  
  
“—but only a little!” Hunk adds hastily. “Very, very little! She just giggled and said she hadn’t expected you to be a romantic.”  
  
Keith is going to die. He is going to physically perish. His humiliation is going to manifest as a real person and run him through with his own bayard.  
  
“Hey.”  
  
He feels Hunk tug at the book; he lets it drop to his lap, uncovering his face. Hunk comes over to his side of the couch and sits next to him.  
  
“Really,” he says, his voice soft in the way it is when he’s sincere, “it’s okay. It’s not a big deal, man. Lots of people like romance. My tina and my amma met cause they both really loved rom-coms, and my amma is a huge butch lady who wears too much black and has a motorcycle. If she isn’t embarrassed about liking meet-cutes then you shouldn’t be either.”  
  
Keith still feels like he could fry an egg on his face, but this information does help, a little.  
  
“Your amma sounds cool,” he says finally.  
  
“She is!” Hunk says, and Keith can tell he’s smiling without looking at him. “She’s the one who taught me how to cook. My tina’s the one who got me into engineering.”  
  
He talks for a long while afterward, tells Keith more about how his moms met, about his little brother and older sister and baby nieces, about visiting extended family in Samoa and India. Keith isn’t sure if he’s talking to cover Keith’s embarrassment or if he just wants to tell him about his family, but he’s happy to listen, especially when Hunk says that the motorcycle his amma currently drives was actually built by him and his tina as a mother-son project.  
  
Eventually Hunk gets roped in by Coran to help with maintenance of something on the control deck. Keith smuggles the book to his room inside of his jacket, then spends the afternoon re-reading it from the beginning so he can get the full effect of the confession.  
  
It’s incredible. Prince Gayan is a fool but Yaffral really knows how to pull out all the stops. Keith reads the scene five times, reads Yaffral kneeling before Prince Gayan after an assassination attempt, reads him kissing the prince’s hands, holding them in his own as he looks up and declares his devotion and affection and love for the prince, and for a brief moment, very brief, so brief he pretends right afterward that he hadn’t, he imagines Lance doing the same for him.  
  
He hides the book under his mattress and re-reads it four times over the next two weeks.

.^.  
  
(Sometimes, in moments of weakness, in that hazy time between waking and sleeping, sleeping and waking, Keith will remember what Lance had said about his first kiss, how he had been on the roof under the stars. He closes his eyes and imagines lying under a star-studded sky, imagines Lance warm and smiling next to him, imagines leaning over and pressing his lips to Lance’s, imagines Lance’s hands cupping his face, tilting it to help him because he knows Keith has never done this before, imagines running his hands along Lance’s shoulders, through his hair, along his jaw to feel it move as he kisses him.)  
  
(He snaps his eyes open, blushing furiously, then gets out of bed and goes to do a couple hundred push ups on the training deck.)

.^.  
  
In the moment, leaving Voltron feels correct, but correct in the way that not picking a flower is correct. He knows it’s best to leave it, knows that if he picks it it will wilt and die, because he can’t possibly take care of it, because he can’t take care of anything, because he’s a goddamn mess and ruins everything he touches—but at the same time, _god_ , does he want to pick that flower, because it’s beautiful and wonderful and its imperfections, its crooked petals and its too-skinny stem, make him love it all the more.  
  
He wants it, but he knows he shouldn’t take it, because someone like him doesn’t deserve it. It deserves better than him, deserves someone who knows how to care for it.  
  
So he doesn’t pick the flower, and he doesn’t stay with Voltron, and though he knows it’s the correct decision, sitting here, in his cold lonely bunk at the Blade of Marmora’s base, he still wishes he had done differently.

.^.  
  
The first couple of days are the easiest. Keith had expected it to be the most difficult, had expected himself to become accustomed over time to being away from his friends, but it’s the opposite: the first couple of days his mind still tells him he’s going to go home again soon, that once this mission is over, once this training session is over, once this dinner is over, he will get in a pod and return to the castle ship, and that expectation lessens the misery of his situation.  
  
It doesn’t really sink in that he’s here for good until the end of the first week. He comes back from a mission and goes straight to his bunk, too tired to eat dinner, then lies on the bed and thinks about what everyone is doing on the castle ship.  
  
They’re probably eating together. Shiro is probably trying not to make a face at whatever Coran made, Coran is probably telling one of his absurd stories, Allura and Hunk are probably gossiping about whatever planet they’re on or had just visited, Lance and Pidge are probably arguing about memes or movies. Keith thinks about the painfully severe dining hall on the base, about the rows of silent blade members eating their bland dinners. He wonders who the other members of the blade think about, if they’ve been here for so long they don’t think about anyone anymore, if he will one day have been here for so long that he will no longer think about anyone either.  
  
He lies awake late into the night, falling asleep sometime around the equivalent of two am, the thought of forgetting his friends churning unpleasantly in his gut. When he wakes the first thing he does is go to a blade member he’s talked to a couple times between missions and whose life he’d saved a couple days before, to her delight and to Kolivan’s annoyance. Madat is the most cheerful blade member Keith has ever met. He isn’t sure why she’s here as opposed to working with a less grim organization like the freedom fighters, but he’s grateful for her presence when everyone else is so stern, especially since his request is a bit unusual.  
  
“Do you know where I could get some paper,” he asks, “and a pencil?”  
  
Madat looks round, then crooks a finger at him. Keith leans in, confused by her attitude. Madat holds out the side of her blade suit as if it’s a coat, and Keith sees that there are pockets sewn into the inside of it, with an array of small items: bottles of nail polish, tiny packets of unfamiliar snacks, pencils and pens and highlighters in various colors, folded up sheets of paper, and a half dozen other knickknacks.  
  
“Take whatever you want, kid,” she says, winking. “I got a connect at the space mall.”  
  
( _hey kid_ , says a voice in his head that sounds like Lance, with a snicker, _wanna buy some paper_?)  
  
Keith bites back the laugh bubbling up in his throat. He takes a pencil and a few sheets of paper, thanks Madat, then heads back to his room. He has a free couple of hours until the next briefing, so he sits on his bunk and draws everyone on the castle ship onto one sheet of paper: Shiro, Allura, and Coran on one side, Pidge, Hunk, and Lance on the other. On a second sheet of paper he draws the lions and the space mice (Black, Red, and Blue on one side, Yellow, Green, and the mice on the other). He tucks the drawings and the spare sheets of paper into the drawer next to his bed, then goes down the hall for the briefing.  
  
Over the next week, whenever he comes back from a mission or thinks so much about the castle ship he feels like he can’t breathe, he takes the drawings out and holds them tightly in his fists, stares at them as if his gaze can bring the figures out of the paper and into his room. Once or twice he thinks about calling the castle ship—it would be difficult with all the communication rules Kolivan enforces, but he’s sure he could figure out a way to sneak into the control room when it’s empty and use the comms—but he thinks he’d probably just be bothering them. It’s not like he has anything to tell them, anyway, and they’d probably be annoyed to have to update him on what he’s missed when he’d made the decision to leave in the first place.  
  
Besides. They could have called him, too, right? And they haven’t. They probably don’t even think about him anymore.  
  
Another week later he hears about the Voltron show from Madat, about the “cutie-pie red paladin who goes by Loverboy Lance.” He flushes, so brightly that Madat pauses to ask if he’s okay, then he stammers out an excuse and goes back to his room. He pulls out a blank sheet of paper, takes out his pencil, thinks for a long moment. He’s only going to indulge this once, so he has to make it good.  
  
In the end Keith settles for a close-up, just head and shoulders, so he can fill in all the details of his face. He draws the curly hair, the bright eyes, the pointy nose, the soft smile, the broad shoulders covered by the humongous hoodie. When it’s finished Keith stares at it for a minute or two, at this feeble graphite substitute for the real Lance, then he folds it up and puts it in the drawer under the other drawings.  
  
The next time he goes on a mission, he pretends to have forgotten his knife and runs to his room. He tugs open the drawer, hesitates for a second, hand hovering over the drawings—then he snatches up the one of Lance, tucks it into his pocket, and runs back to the pod about to leave for their mission.  
  
He keeps it his pocket permanently from then onward.

.^.  
  
The weeks pass in a blur of mission after mission, until one day Kolivan gathers everyone into the biggest meeting room and tells them about the attempt to take Naxzela. Preparation for the battle consumes every waking minute and even a few sleeping ones; Keith has lost count of how many times he’s dreamt about the battle, about it going horribly wrong or, if his brain has decided to be optimistic for once, about it succeeding.  
  
He’s assigned to a ship with a handful of rebel fighters. He enters the ship, takes in his surroundings and the other people in it, looks ahead of him and sees—  
  
“Pidge!” he says, too loud in his delight, and for half a second he’s confused by the tugging at the corners of his mouth, until he realizes it’s his first real, involuntary smile in weeks—but then he gets closer to the person and sees that he was mistaken.  
  
“Oh,” he says, his smile fading. “Sorry, I—” He squints at the person, then says, incredulously, “Matt?”  
  
“The one and only!” Matt says, grinning. “You’re Keith, right? Pidge has told me all about you.”  
  
Keith’s stomach lurches with guilt. How he had not known Pidge had found Matt? It was her number one goal, her main reason for getting involved in the Garrison and Voltron in the first place—how could something so important have happened and Keith _not know_? What else had happened that he doesn’t know about?  
  
“Hey,” he says, then, belatedly, upon realizing Matt had been saying something and that he had interrupted him, “Sorry, just—is everyone okay?”  
  
Matt blinks at him. “What?”  
  
“Everyone—the people on the castle ship,” Keith clarifies. “Are they all okay? And safe, and—and happy?”  
  
“Yeah,” Matt says. “They’re all fine.”  
  
Keith nods, though he doesn’t know why. “Good,” he says, and he doesn’t know he’s saying that when there’s such an unpleasant feeling in his stomach. “I’m glad.”  
  
(He is glad. He’s glad they’re all okay, and he’s glad they’re all safe, and he’s glad they’re all—happy—happy without him—because it would be ridiculous for them to be worried or sad or anything—it would be ridiculous for them to think about him at all when he has no function there anymore—and he knows that, he _knows_ that, this is not new information, because if they had thought about him at all or had missed him at all they would have called him, but they hadn’t, so that—that was that.)  
  
“We’re gonna go over the plan one more time,” says another rebel fighter, pulling Keith back into the present.  
  
He nods, gives her his attention, and puts loneliness and unhappiness and being forgotten out of his mind.

.^.  
  
The party is massive.  
  
Naxzela has been freed, Lotor claims to want to work with the Voltron alliance, and now that the barrier has been broken and Lotor is in his pseudo-dungeon until everyone can figure out how much they can trust him, the alliance is throwing a party to end all parties.  
  
Kolivan gives the blade members free reign to partake, so long as they are back on the Blade of Marmora’s ship to return to the base in eight vargas. Keith feels exhausted and wired-up at the same time. He’s standing in the corner of a huge room in the castle ship, one that must have been a ballroom back in the day. He doesn’t see anyone he knows very well, just vaguely familiar faces from the blade or rebel alliance. He looks for white armor shot through with flashes of color, but there’s so many people that one of the paladins could walk right past him and he might not notice.  
  
The number of people is starting to grate on him, actually. He’s weirdly irritable, and growing steadily more so. He feels like he should be more upset about almost dying, but he can’t feel much of anything when there’s so many sounds and scents and colors. There’s just so much, there’s _so much_ , so many people and things, loud music and pungent food and sharp lights and bright colors and it’s kind of starting to feel like he can’t breathe because he’s so _irritable_ and his skin is prickling and his stomach feels weird and—  
  
Keith squeezes his eyes shut, but the cacophony of music and voices and laughter and people moving about still overwhelms him. He plugs his ears with his fingers, only slightly ashamed of how silly he must look, and holds his breath so the smells of food and perfume and sweat won’t be so strong—but of course he has to breathe eventually, has to open his eyes and unplug his ears, and everything is still there, still there and loud and smelly and bright and fuck he really needs to leave but he’s uncomfortable and irritable and there’s a tangle forming in his chest and his eyes are stinging and there’s a lump in his throat and—and—and—and—  
  
—and someone takes hold of his elbow, very gently.  
  
He jumps and turns to see who it is. He realizes he’s gasping; he thinks his hands might be shaking.  
  
“Hey, buddy,” says Hunk, and his voice is mercifully quiet compared to the din in the ballroom. He lets go of Keith’s elbow. “It’s okay, you’re gonna be okay. Come with me.”  
  
Keith lets Hunk lead him through the ballroom, snaking through the crowd of people. Every few seconds he’ll bump into someone or they’ll bump into him, and the touch is awful, makes everything worse and worse and worse, especially since the person always laughs or gasps, startled, and then half yells some kind of apology, and Keith just wishes everyone would shut up and stay still and _stop_ —  
  
“In here,” Hunk says, still speaking very softly.  
  
Keith goes through the door. Hunk shuts it behind them. Keith doesn’t notice much more about the room than the fact that it’s dark, and the walls are thick enough to completely block out the noise outside, and there’s a short bench to the left of the door. When he sits on it it creaks loudly; he hears it creak a second time, hears Hunk say _is it okay if I hold your hand_ , feels himself nod once, feels Hunk take his hand in his own—and yes, his hands are definitely shaking, and Keith kind of wants to die of shame, because it’s a fucking party, he shouldn’t be having a breakdown like this—  
  
“Can you breathe?” Hunk asks.  
  
“Yeah,” Keith manages. “It’s not—it’s not really a panic attack, I don’t think—I don’t know what this is—”  
  
He breaks off. He takes a deep, shaky breath, then another, then another. He makes a fist with his free hand, rubs his thumb along the side of his index finger, over and over and over until his eyes stop stinging and his hands stop shaking and the tangle in his chest slowly lessens. Hunk sits patiently with him, still holding his hand. It occurs to Keith that he’s keeping him from the party.  
  
“Sorry,” he mumbles. “I’m okay now. I don’t know why I—sorry.”  
  
“Don’t be sorry,” Hunk says firmly. He lets go of Keith’s hand. Keith kind of wants to ask for it back but he doesn’t know how to without making it weird, so he says nothing. “It happens to a lot of people. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”  
  
“It’s stupid,” Keith mutters, avoiding his gaze. “It shouldn’t happen here. It’s just a party.”  
  
“Sensory overload hits at weird times, man,” Hunk says. “You know I actually can’t watch movies in theaters? Because the screen is big I can’t deal with all the colors and lights and sounds. And once me and Pidge were playing Mario Kart and I freaked out cause it’s so bright and we had the sound on too high. And I have full-blown anxiety attacks a lot. Like, a _lot_. Back at the Garrison I’d have them for things that shouldn’t even be that big of a deal, like making a phone call.” He pauses. “I didn’t mean to make this about me. Sorry about that. My point is that this isn’t something to be ashamed of and it’s something a lot of people struggle with and it can triggered by a lot of different stuff.”  
  
Keith thinks about that for a moment. He’s always known Hunk is the anxious type but he hadn’t thought it was this bad. He’s so big and strong and _solid_. It’s hard to imagine him shaking like Keith had been a few minutes earlier over a video game or a phone call.  
  
“I’m sorry you have to deal with that,” Keith says finally.  
  
Hunk shrugs. “I’m used to it.”  
  
“Still sucks.”  
  
“I mean.” He shrugs again. “I’m not trying to say it doesn’t, but it does help to know what to do? Like, knowing how to cope with it. Especially since it isn’t exactly easy to get medication for anxiety while up in space.” He peers at Keith. “Are you getting enough asleep and eating properly?”  
  
Keith snorts. “I don’t think that’ll make a difference.”  
  
“It does!” Hunk insists. “It won’t make it go away entirely but you shouldn’t underestimate the benefit of taking care of your physical self. And like, even if it doesn’t help at all, it’s better to have sensory overload and be well rested than have sensory overload and be sleep deprived.”  
  
Keith makes a noncommittal noise. Hunk bumps his shoulder with his own.  
  
“Hey.” He sounds stern. “Promise me you’ll sleep and eat enough. And take days off from training and missions to relax.”  
  
Keith still doesn’t respond.  
  
“ _Hey_ ,” Hunk repeats. He bumps Keith’s shoulder again, harder this time. “Promise me.”  
  
“Okay,” Keith says, mostly because he has a feeling Hunk will keep knocking shoulders with him until he agrees, and he doesn’t want a bunch of bruises on his arm. “I promise.”  
  
Hunk sounds satisfied. “Good.”  
  
There is a silence. The tangle in Keith’s chest is still there somewhat, and the silence tightens it again. He’d imagined Hunk to talk nonstop when they met again, to hug him tightly and rattle off his spiel of “oh my gosh, OMG, we have so much to tell you,” and it feels—off—that Hunk has gone completely silent. Part of Keith wonders if something is wrong, if he’s done something to anger him, but another part of him tells him he doesn’t have the right to know anymore. Keith had left, and according to Matt everyone is getting along fine, and though Hunk is still kind enough to help Keith, he doesn’t consider him a close enough friend anymore to talk to him beyond that, and—and that’s fine. It’s fine.  
  
“I’m gonna go back to the party,” Hunk says at length.  
  
The tangle in Keith’s chest tightens further.  
  
“Okay,” he says. He’s relieved to hear his voice is even. “Sorry I kept you. And thanks for bringing me back here.”  
  
“No problem, man.” Hunk leans back on the bench with a creak. “Do you want anything? I can sneak something back here if you wanna stay here for a while.”  
  
“No, I’m okay.”  
  
“You sure?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
The bench creaks again as Hunk stands. “If you need anything just come get me, okay?”  
  
“Okay,” says Keith, and he hears Hunk’s footsteps as he starts to leave the room, and then a thought flashes into his head, sudden but comforting, tugging at the knot lingering in his chest.  
  
“Actually,” he starts, then stops.  
  
Hunk’s footsteps halt.  
  
“Actually?” he prompts.  
  
Keith struggles against the renewed wave of embarrassment, then says in a rush, so fast he’s worried Hunk won’t be able to understand it, “Could you ask Lance to come in here?”  
  
There is a beat. Part of Keith wants to look up to see Hunk’s expression, but another part knows he might die of mortification if he did, so he keeps his gaze determinedly on the floor.  
  
“Of course, buddy,” Hunk says, and Keith’s stomach jumps at the curl of amusement in his voice. Is he that obvious? “Whatever you need.”  
  
Keith croaks a thank you, too raw and embarrassed to manage much else. He hears Hunk walk to the door and open it, hears the brief roar of the party outside, hears the door snap shut behind him.  
  
As soon as he is gone Keith takes a few more deep breaths. The thought that he will see Lance in a few minutes makes his stomach coil, so to keep himself calm he stares at a tapestry on the opposite wall, which is of some kind of sugary picnic scene in a meadow. There’s enough starlight filtering in from the windows that he can see the flowers stitched on the border. He counts them, and is up to fifty-six when the door opens once more.  
  
“Hey, man,” he hears Lance say.  
  
His voice washes over Keith like water on a hot day, like sunshine when it’s cold out, and the last of the knot in Keith’s chest finally unravels.  
  
“Hi,” he says, without turning.  
  
The bench creaks as Lance sits down beside him. He’s closer than Hunk had been, close enough that their arms press together. The proximity makes Keith’s nerves start jumping again, though in a much more pleasant way. For a long minute neither of them speak, and Keith is starting to worry that Lance is mad too, that he’s ruined this relationship as well, when:  
  
“I’m really glad to see you,” Lance says.  
  
Warmth blooms within Keith, sudden and fierce.  
  
“I’m glad to see you too,” he says, and he’s so relieved that Lance is speaking to him that he can’t even bother being embarrassed by the earnest sincerity in his voice.  
  
Lance looks at him, and smiles, and it’s the soft crinkly-eyed smile, and the starlight through the windows is so bright it dapples his skin, and Keith wants to burn this image into his brain, this image of Lance smiling so softly at him, illuminated by starlight and so handsome Keith has to catch his breath, and—  
  
“It’s weird,” Lance says. “I actually kinda miss you.”  
  
—and Keith can’t look at him anymore, not when he looks like that, not when he’s sitting so close, not when his voice is as soft as his smile, not when he’s saying— _that_ —as if he’s been thinking about Keith—as if he’s even remembered Keith’s existence—as if Keith matters to him at all—  
  
Keith tears his gaze away. He fiddles with a loose thread on his suit, pretends it requires his utmost attention.  
  
“You did say you wouldn’t have anyone to make fun of,” he says.  
  
Lance’s chuckle is more like a huff. “Yeah, I guess.” Out of the corner of Keith’s eye he can see Lance turn his head to look out of the window. “But I dunno, it’s not just that.”  
  
Keith’s heart is in his throat.  
  
“It’s—I dunno,” Lance says again. He sounds uncertain, almost shy, and Keith has to work to focus on what he’s saying and not how much he likes the way Lance sounds like this. “We hung out a lot for a while and then you were on blade missions all the time but you were still around sometimes so it wasn’t that bad. But then you left entirely and it was kind of a shock. The day after you left I saw an Olkari riding around on a hoverbike they’d built and I actually got up to go find you and show it to you before I realized you weren’t around.”  
  
There is a beat of silence.  
  
“Which is fine,” Lance says, and the uncertainty is greater now, tinged with self-consciousness. Vaguely Keith is aware that he shouldn’t be able to glean so much from just Lance’s voice. He’s afraid to think too much about what it means that he can anyway. “It’s fine that you’re not around, I mean. You wanted to leave and we all support your decision. It was just weird to go from being around you constantly to never seeing you at all.”  
  
Keith’s chest aches. He wants to say something, but he doesn’t know what to say—and he’s confused, because if Lance missed him, if Lance had been thinking about him, then why hadn’t he ever tried to call?  
  
“Why didn’t you call us back?” Lance asks.  
  
Keith looks over at him, startled. For a second he thinks he had actually spoken aloud. In the next Lance’s words register with him and he blinks confusedly.  
  
“What?”  
  
Lance’s eyes are soft, a little hurt. “I called you every day for like two weeks. Hunk and Pidge and Allura each tried a few times too and you never answered any of us.”  
  
Keith blinks again, even more bewildered.  
  
“I never got any calls,” he says.  
  
The hurt melts into something else—annoyance at first, then dawning comprehension.  
  
“That motherfucker.” Lance shakes his head, snorts. “Every time we tried we got ahold of Kolivan so we’d just ask him to tell you to call us back whenever you could. Pidge tried to find a way to get in touch with you directly but she wasn’t sure if you even had any kind of communication device with you.”  
  
“I don’t,” Keith says. “Not one that can link to your devices, anyway.”  
  
Lance sits back. The bench creaks. “Okay, well, that’s one mystery solved,” he says. “I’ll let everyone else know what happened. Pidge will be relieved. She was starting to think you didn’t like us anymore.”  
  
Keith thinks of her frowning at her screen, of her pressing the ‘call’ button over and over, of her waiting for a return call that never came. He thinks of Hunk doing the same, of his hope turning into his trademark done-with-your-bullshit sarcasm, of him being kind enough to comfort Keith anyway even after thinking he’d been ignoring them, of him sitting silently on the bench when that comfort had been offered because he’s still mad. He thinks of Allura trying to call him after a long day to rant to him like she used to after their sparring sessions, of thinking that maybe he didn’t want to talk to her after she had held a grudge against him for being part Galra.  
  
He thinks of Lance calling him every day for two weeks, of everyone else giving up while he keeps trying, and suddenly Keith is furious, suddenly he wants to burst out of the room and run down the hall and find Kolivan and shake him out of his horrible, implacable impassivity, wants to yell at himself for being so stupid as to not even try to contact them when they had been trying so hard to call him—  
  
“Hey.”  
  
Keith is brought back to the present with a jolt. Lance is leaning forward again, his eyes serious.  
  
“Don’t beat yourself up,” he says. “It’s okay. It’s not your fault Kolivan’s a douche.”  
  
Keith snickers before he can help himself. Lance grins, a flash of white in the dark room. They sit in silence for a second, then:  
  
“I’ll find a way to talk to you,” Keith promises. “It might not be often but I’ll figure out a way to do it.”  
  
“Good,” Lance says, still smiling. “But don’t worry about it if you can’t, okay? Now that we know it’s hard for you to contact us we won’t think you hate us or something.”  
  
“I don’t,” Keith says. He knows it’s implied but he wants to say it aloud anyway. “I don’t hate any of you, not at all, even though I—” He falters. “I never tried to call any of you but it doesn’t mean I hate any of you, I just—it’s just—”  
  
He breaks off again, unsure of what he means and frustrated that he can’t articulate the weird desperate tangle forming in his chest again, but Lance puts his hand on his knee, gently, and the tangle loosens, replaced by something fluttery in his stomach.  
  
“I get it,” he says.  
  
Keith stares at his hand. He’s overcome with the urge to reach out and take it in his own, wrap both of his hands around Lance’s, bring it to his lips and kiss it.  
  
He feels his face heat. He’s glad the room is so dark. He doesn’t know whether to be glad or disappointed when Lance moves his hand.  
  
“Are you doing okay?” he asks. “Are you eating enough? Sleeping enough?”  
  
Keith huffs a laugh. “Hunk asked me the same thing.”  
  
“We care about you,” Lance says. “Just cause you’re gone doesn’t mean we don’t still want you to be okay.”  
  
“I am,” Keith says, “doing okay, I mean,” and then, with a jolt, he remembers what he had almost done only hours ago. “Have you talked to Matt yet?”  
  
“Matt?” Lance’s brow crinkles. “About what?”  
  
Keith opens his mouth, closes it.  
  
“Nothing,” he says. “It’s not important. Don’t worry about it.”  
  
Lance looks skeptical. “That’s the exact opposite of what you should say if you don’t want me to worry about it.”  
  
Keith huffs again. “I’m fine, it’s fine, I—” He breaks off, takes a deep breath. “Just don’t be mad if he tells you.”  
  
“That’s…really ominous.”  
  
“I know, I’m sorry, I just—I can’t talk about it now,” Keith says. He fiddles with the loose thread on his suit again. “I’m really tired.”  
  
For a moment it looks like Lance might argue, but all he says is, “If you want to take a nap I can bring you a pillow and some blankets.”  
  
Keith glances at the floor. There’s a huge rectangular rug in the middle; it looks thick enough to be a comfortable space to lie on.  
  
“That’d be nice,” he says.  
  
“Cool.” Lance gets up; the sudden cold against Keith’s side is jarring. “Be back in a bit.”  
  
While he’s gone Keith settles on the rug. He sits with his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms wrapped around his legs, facing the windows so he can see the stars. His bunk back at the base doesn’t have any windows; he misses being able to see space while he falls asleep.  
  
Lance returns under a towering pile of blankets and pillows.  
  
“Party’s still going full swing,” he reports, voice muffled by the fabric. He tips the pile onto the rug beside Keith, who takes out a pillow and two blankets and glances up to see—  
  
“What are you doing?”  
  
Lance doesn’t look up from his armor, the top part of which he is unbuckling.  
  
“I’m tired too, man,” he says. “Thought I’d nap for a bit as well.”  
  
All of Keith’s exhaustion vanishes at the thought of Lance lying down beside him—sleeping beside him—his face calm and open and—  
  
“Oh” is all he can manage, and despite his best efforts his nervousness must have been audible, because Lance looks up.  
  
“Would you rather I not?” he asks. “I can sleep elsewhere if you’d rather be alone.”  
  
“No!” Keith says, too loudly, and flushes. “I was just—surprised. I thought you’d want to be at the party.”  
  
“Eh.” Lance shrugs as he removes the top part of his armor. He rolls up the sleeves of the bodysuit—Keith’s mouth feels weirdly dry—then sets to work on the bottom part. “I was there long enough.” He shoots Keith a grin, a little crooked. “Besides, I can hang out with any of them any time. Now’s the only time I can hang out with you.”  
  
He removes the bottom part of his armor, sets it on the bench with the top part, then takes out two pillows and three blankets from the pile, organizes them into some kind of complicated nest, and lies down in it. Keith watches him, his heart hammering. Even with the bodysuit he looks cozy and comfortable and Keith wonders how warm he’d be if he just—curled up close to him—if he tucked his face in Lance’s neck and pressed against him and wrapped his arms around him—  
  
“You gonna sleep sitting?” Lance asks.  
  
Keith jumps. He arranges the pillow, closer to Lance than is good for his cardiac health, then lies down and pulls the blankets over him. He turns onto his side to face Lance, who is also on his side, his hands folded under his cheek. There’s still starlight decorating his skin; Keith stares at the pattern, dazed, until some small traitorous voice in the back of mind whispers _lying under a star-studded sky, leaning over and pressing his lips to Lance’s_ , and he has to busy himself with punching his pillow into a suitable shape so Lance can’t notice how red his face is.  
  
Despite claiming to want to take a nap, neither of them sleep for a while. Instead they talk—or whisper, rather, since Lance has very strong opinions on this point.  
  
(“We have to whisper,” Lance declares. “It’s the first rule of sleepovers. When the lights go out and everyone’s lying down, you gotta whisper.”  
  
Keith bites back a smile. “Is this a sleepover?”  
  
“Yeah, of course!”)  
  
Keith tells him about the Blade. At first he stumbles, because it doesn’t seem like there’s anything to say, but Lance keeps asking questions, and he looks so genuinely interested that Keith ends up telling him even inconsequential stuff.  
  
(“Do you always sleep in the suit?”  
  
“Sometimes. We all have more than one so it’s not like they’re always dirty.”  
  
Lance wrinkles his nose. “Still gross.”)  
  
After that he tells Lance about Madat, about her unexpected cheerfulness and her space mall connect.  
  
(Lance snickers. “Hey kid,” he says, “wanna buy some paper?” and Keith feels like his heart might burst)  
  
Lance catches him up on everything on the castle ship, on Matt’s return and the Voltron show and dumb crap they get up to during their downtime. Keith drinks in every word, the sound of his voice and the way his face moves as he talks, and tucks it away in his heart to remember again when he’s lonely.  
  
He doesn’t know when he falls asleep. One minute he’s listening to Lance say something about Hunk teaching Allura to disco dance, and the next minute, or so it seems, he wakes with a jerk and turns his head to find Lance snoring quietly beside him.  
  
Keith blinks once, twice. His head is fuzzy with sleep. He wants to stay here, to slide back into slumber and maybe—possibly—perhaps—nudge closer to Lance, to use sleep as an excuse to get nearer to him, to brush his hand or his arm, but he has no idea how long it’s been since Kolivan gave them all leave to enjoy the party, and he should really get back to the Blade of Marmora’s ship, just in case.  
  
He sits up, ignoring the way his body aches in protest, and folds up the blankets. He places them atop the pillow and starts to get up, then stops.  
  
He shouldn’t just leave. Lance will likely understand what happened, but still, Keith can’t just _leave_. But Lance is sleeping so peacefully, and Keith doesn’t want to wake him up, but he doesn’t have anything to leave him a note with, and—  
  
Keith shifts and hears crinkling in one of his pockets.  
  
Oh.  
  
He reaches into the pocket and pulls out the folded-up drawing of Lance he had done so many weeks ago. He peeks at Lance, at the drawing, at Lance again. He doesn’t have anything to write with, so he can’t leave a real note, but hopefully Lance will understand that this is his way of not leaving without a word.  
  
Keith unfolds the drawing and put it on top of the blankets. He looks at Lance once more, at his long eyelashes and his rumpled hair and his half-open mouth, which should be gross but is actually kind of endearing. Keith puts up his hood, passes his hand over his face to activate the mask, then creeps out of the room, through the now empty ballroom, and to the Blade of Marmora’s ship.

.^.  
  
It takes Keith three weeks and four tries to call the castle ship.  
  
The first attempt is two days after Naxzela. He finds the control room empty after dinner and is halfway through punching in the comm link for the castle ship when Madat comes in and tells him he’s needed for a mission.  
  
The second attempt is when he returns from that mission. He pretends to need to check something in the control room but when he gets there he finds it weirdly full of people despite the odd hour, so he has no choice but to return to his room.  
  
The third attempt is technically successful. He calls the castle ship sometime in the evening. Allura answers; she and the other paladins are all gathered in a room Keith has never seen before.  
  
“Oh, hello, Keith, I wasn’t expecting you to join!” Allura says, with a warm smile. “Though it is quite nice to see you again!” She squints at the screen. “Why isn’t Kolivan there?”  
  
Keith blinks at her, bewildered, then sees the other screens in the room light up as leaders from other planets and organizations in the Voltron alliance ring in, and—oh.  
  
“Uh,” he begins, feeling heat creep up his neck. He can’t believe he’s forgotten about this conference call. “I—he’s—he’s coming.”  
  
“Hi Keith!” Pidge calls, waving. “We’re gonna turn in Lotor to get my dad back.”  
  
“We haven’t made a decision yet,” Shiro corrects. “We need to discuss it further.”  
  
Keith frowns at that. It seems weird that anyone on the team would even consider letting Zarkon keep Pidge’s dad. Before he can say anything, however, Kolivan comes into the control room and takes over the conversation with his usual maddening impassivity.  
  
Keith doesn’t say anything for the rest of the call, though he does think he sees Hunk wiggle his fingers at him in a sneaky sort of wave, and he’s almost certain Lance winks at him right before the call ends.  
  
The fourth attempt is half a day after Zarkon’s death. Kolivan is busy trying to sort rumor from fact regarding the exact nature of the emperor’s death and what this means for the Galra Empire and the Blade of Marmora’s goals going forward. Keith wanders around the base, listening to snatches of conversation and wondering how the paladins are doing and trying to remember the last time he slept more than a handful of hours at a time, when he runs smack into Madat.  
  
“Whoa, watch where you’re going, kid,” she says, not unkindly. “You okay?”  
  
“Yeah,” he says automatically. “Sorry. I’m just distracted.”  
  
She peers at him for a moment, then seems to come to a conclusion of some kind, and says, her voice suspiciously airy, “You know, the control room was completely empty when I walked past it. And I know no one’s gonna be able to go in there for a while cause someone changed the passcode to 4376 and the message about the change isn’t gonna be delivered for twenty doboshes. Some kind of technical error or something.” She walks past him down the hall, calling over her shoulder, “Sure would be easy for someone to just go in there and call whoever they want.”  
  
Keith feels a grin unfurl over his face.  
  
“Thank you!” he shouts after her, then tears down the hall to the control room.  
  
When he gets there he punches in the code Madat mentioned and makes sure to shut the door behind him before approaching the screen. The anticipation in his gut is so strong he can barely stand it; he types in the comm link for the castle ship so fast he misses half the numbers and has to start over, then watches the Galra symbols that read ‘ringing’ over and over, hugging himself in his excitement.  
  
The screen flashes, and he’s staring at the control deck of the castle ship, at Allura’s podium in the front and the paladin chairs on either side, and his heart feels like it might explode out of his chest with how happy the sight makes him.  
  
A split second later, however, the happiness vanishes, because there’s no one there. The control deck’s auto-answer had kicked in, a modification Pidge and Hunk had made in case of emergencies or inability to manually respond, and Keith is staring at an empty room, and he can’t believe that when he’s finally managed to call the castle ship no one’s there to talk to him, and the prospect of coming so close and still not being able to speak to his friends makes his throat feel tight and his eyes sting, and he knows it’s stupid to be this upset but he’s been trying so hard to contact them and he wants to talk to them so badly and—  
  
The doors to the control deck slide open. Hunk walks in, his head bent over a tablet.  
  
Relief floods through Keith, so sudden he feels almost dizzy. “Hunk!”  
  
Hunk jumps about half a foot into the air and nearly throws the tablet in his surprise. He catches himself just in time and looks at the screen, a delighted smile spreading over his face.  
  
“Keith!” He tucks the tablet in his pocket and hurries over. “Aw, buddy, I’m so glad to see you! How are you?” He frowns. “Wait. Is this a fun call or an emergency call? Are you sick? Are you hurt? Are you _dying_?” His voice turns frantic. “Oh, man, please don’t be like, dying, it’d be awful if this was your last act or something, at least hang on long enough that I can go get everyone else—”  
  
“I’m not dying!” Keith interrupts, before Hunk can spiral. “I’m okay, everything’s fine.”  
  
Hunk breathes a sigh of relief. “Okay. Good.” He clasps his hands in front of him and smiles up at the screen. “How are you?”  
  
“I’m okay,” Keith says, smiling back. “Stuff’s been weird here cause of Zarkon’s death.”  
  
“Dude, you have no idea,” Hunk says. “None of us really know how to react. And I think”—he hesitates—“I think it’s kind of, like…cheating?”  
  
Keith frowns. “What do you mean?”  
  
“I mean.” Hunk exhales hard. “Zarkon killed all of Allura’s people and destroyed her planet and then _Lotor_ kills him? I kind of feel like Allura got cheated.”  
  
For a moment Keith tries to imagine how he’d feel if everyone and everything he loves was destroyed, if everyone on the castle ship was gone, if he spent years trying to defeat the person responsible only to have retribution snatched from him by the person’s own son.  
  
He fucking hates it.  
  
“Has someone talked to Allura about it?” he asks.  
  
“No, cause none of us really know how to bring it up,” Hunk says. “Like, how do you talk about that? Hey, princess, are you okay now that your only chance at triumphing over the guy who committed genocide of your people is gone? It’s not exactly dinner conversation.”  
  
“Yeah, I guess.”  
  
There is a pause.  
  
“This is a really big jump,” Hunk says, “so sorry for the sudden mood swing, but did you take that book with you?”  
  
Keith blinks. “What book?”  
  
“The one with Yaffral and Prince Gayan. The romance. I wanted to read it again so I, uh”—Hunk looks sheepish—“I searched through your room—”  
  
“ _Hunk_ ,” Keith says, exasperated.  
  
“I’m sorry!” Hunk says, even more sheepishly. “You know how I am! I go into your room a lot anyway cause it was laundry day and I needed to get your clothes, so I thought I’d look for the book too.”  
  
Keith stares. “You clean my clothes?”  
  
Hunk nods. Keith admires how thoroughly unembarrassed he looks; if he was caught doing something like this he’d want to sink into the ground. “Yeah, man! When you come back you’re gonna want to wear your old clothes again, so I go ahead and throw them in the laundry every couple of weeks so they won’t get musty and gross.”  
  
Keith opens his mouth, closes it, feels a weird bubbly glow in the pit of his stomach at the thought of Hunk doing so much. Before meeting the paladins the only good friend Keith had was Shiro, and it’s strange to think he has so many people now who care about him.  
  
“Thank you,” he says finally. “You don’t have to do that.”  
  
Hunk waves off his thanks and continues. “Anyway, I looked through your room the other day but I couldn’t find it and I thought maybe you took it with you.”  
  
“I didn’t.” Keith huffs, something between a chuckle and a scoff. “It’s not like I have a whole lot of time for that kind of stuff here.”  
  
“Do you not get time off?”  
  
“I do, sort of, but it’s not like—” Keith breaks off, tries to think of how to explain it. “There’s not really time for stuff like that here.”  
  
Hunk’s brow furrows. “Do blade members not read?”  
  
“No, they do, the base has a small library but it’s—there’s not—” Keith breaks off again, frustrated. “It’s serious here. There’s no time for—for silly things. Happy things.”  
  
“And you’re okay with that?” Hunk asks, sounding skeptical.  
  
“I—yes,” Keith stammers, feeling uncomfortably put on the spot. “Yeah. Of course.”  
  
(and he is)  
  
(he _is_ )  
  
(it’s not like he lies in bed every night, in that hazy dreaminess between waking and sleeping, and remembers playing board games with Pidge, remembers laughing until he cried when Hunk tried to teach Allura how to dab, remembers waking up extra early to talk to Shiro and pretend to enjoy the terrible space coffee he makes, remembers Coran always coming to check on him when he’s alone in a corner of the castle ship and doesn’t know how to tell people that he wants company)  
  
(it’s not like he remembers lying in the room by the ballroom on the castle ship, remembers Lance lying only a few inches away, remembers waking up and seeing his face calm and soft and open. it’s not like he thinks about doing it over again, but this time scooting closer to Lance, putting his arm around him and tucking himself against his chest and putting his face in the crook of his neck and feeling safe and warm and—)  
  
Keith takes a deep breath.  
  
“The book’s under my mattress,” he says. “You can just keep it.”  
  
“Okay,” Hunk says. “I gotta return it sometime anyway.” He peers at Keith. “Are you okay? You look kinda weird.”  
  
“I’m fine,” Keith says automatically. “I was just thinking about something.”  
  
(he had meant to draw another picture to replace the one he had left with Lance, but he hasn’t. the longer he stays here the more absurd stuff like that feels, and he can’t bring himself to draw another picture, not when doing so is so self-indulgent and—and creepy—because it is sort of creepy, right—drawing everyone together is fine but a whole separate drawing for Lance is really fucking weird—especially when he doesn’t mean anything to Lance—even if Lance means everything to him—)  
  
He hears a knock on the door of the control room, hears whoever it is mutter something about _must’ve changed the code_ and _who was in charge of changing it this time_. Madat’s voice echoes in his mind, whispering _twenty doboshes_ , and Keith comes to a decision.  
  
He can’t bring himself to make another drawing of Lance, but he can at least see him in person, can imprint a new image of him in his memory for him to think about when he’s half asleep and his heart is soft.  
  
“I don’t have much more time,” he says. “I’m not really supposed to be using this but Madat—one of the blade members—she bought me a bit of time so I could call.”  
  
“Aw, man!” Hunk says, mouth drooping. “Do you already need to go?”  
  
“Not yet, but is there any way you could get—any of the others in here too?”  
  
Hunk squints at him. Keith stares back unblinkingly. He’s not dumb enough to hope that Hunk won’t notice his awkward pause and guess at what it means, but he does hope his suit and the lighting of the control room hide the blush creeping up his neck.  
  
“Lance is out helping deliver food to the other side of Olkarion,” Hunk says finally.  
  
“Not—not just—there are—I—” Keith splutters, feeling his face heat even more. “I didn’t mean Lance, I meant—everybody—”  
  
“Suuure,” Hunk drawls, and his expression is the closest to a real-life lenny face as Keith has ever seen.  
  
Keith crosses his arms and scowls as best he can when his face is bright red.  
  
“Is there anyone else around?” he asks again.  
  
Hunk’s expression melts into one of regret. “I’m sorry, man, but no. Olkarion just got another round of refugees so everyone’s helping out with that. The only reason I’m here is cause I had to fix some issues with the communication devices on our tablets.”  
  
The disappointment that fills Keith is overwhelming. He croaks out an “oh okay” and looks away from the screen. For a horrible second he feels the tears from earlier prick at the backs of his eyes, and he has to clench his jaw and curl his fists into his sides to keep them at bay.  
  
When he’s calm again he looks back at the screen. Hunk’s eyes are gentle.  
  
“I’ll tell them you called,” he says. “They’ll be really happy you did! We all miss you a lot.”  
  
Keith just nods.  
  
“Is there anything you want me to tell them?” Hunk asks. “Messages, hugs”—the lenny face is back, briefly—“kisses?”  
  
Keith valiantly ignores the last one.  
  
“Just tell them all hi,” he says, then, stiltedly, “and, um, that I hope they’re all doing well.”  
  
“Will do.”  
  
Keith hears another knock at the control room door, hears beeps at the keypad outside.  
  
“I gotta go,” he says. “Thanks for talking to me.”  
  
“Of course,” Hunk says. “Bye, and stay safe!”  
  
“Bye,” Keith says, and cuts the link right as the doors to the control room slide open.

.^.  
  
After a lecture about not opening the door for the blade member who had knocked the first time, Keith goes to a briefing for a mission to collect intel on what the Galra Empire are doing now that Zarkon is dead. He ends up having to pinch himself a couple times to pay attention; he feels kind of glowy after getting to see part of the castle ship and talk to someone who actually smiles and has real emotions.  
  
The mission takes place a few minutes after the briefing. He goes with two other blade members whose names he doesn’t know and who thankfully all come back to the base with him intact once the mission is over. It’s a straightforward mission, a basic in-and-out, get-the-information job, not tiring or difficult at all, but he can’t remember the last time he slept, so he goes to his bunk as soon as the post-mission briefing is over.  
  
Later, he realizes he should have known something was up when he wakes up and realizes he’d been asleep for eight vargas, uninterrupted. Blade members never get that much sleep in a row; there’s always something. But when he checks the time and sees that he managed to get the equivalent of a full night’s rest, he’s only pleasantly surprised that his stress and nightmares left him alone long enough for him to rest properly.  
  
He gets up, washes up and changes into his spare blade suit, and is debating whether to get food first or go to the base’s training deck when he hears a knock at his door.  
  
Of course. There’s always something.  
  
He opens the door, eyes starting to flick up by habit to look at whichever blade member it is in the eye—but then stops, because instead of towering over him, this blade member is only slightly taller than he is.  
  
Keith frowns. The blade member’s hood is up and they’re still wearing their mask, so he can’t tell who it is, but here’s a nagging prickle in his chest, in his stomach, in the tips of his fingers, the feeling of recognizing someone but not knowing who it is—but that’s ridiculous, how would he know this person, he hasn’t ever met any blade members outside of the base or missions—and besides, his person is only a couple inches taller than he is and he would remember meeting a Galra who’s so short—but there’s something about the tilt of the head that’s familiar, the shoulders—  
  
—the _shoulders_ —  
  
—and suddenly Keith knows why this person seems familiar, and his heart thuds—  
  
—but no, it can’t be possible, it’s literally impossible, how could—  
  
The blade member passes a hand over the front of their face. The mask deactivates, and Keith’s heart thuds again, because holy fuck, holy _fuck_ —  
  
“Hi,” Lance whispers, and then he grins, and _winks_ , like this isn’t some kind of hallucination, or mirage, or maybe a goddamn miracle, like he isn’t supposed to be light-years away, like it isn’t completely impossible for him to be here, standing in Keith’s doorway at the Blade of Marmora’s base, wearing a blade suit that suits him distractingly well. “I’m here to bust you out. C’mon.”  
  
Keith just stares at him. He’s worried this _is_ a hallucination, that maybe he somehow activated the part of his suit that triggers the visions usually induced during Marmora trials, that maybe he’s still asleep in bed and having the worst, most wonderful dream.  
  
Lance’s grin falters.  
  
“Do you not want to?” he asks, his voice still low. “It’s only for a little while. Hunk said he talked to you and you said there’s no time for happy things here, which is stupid cause there’s always time for happy things, so I thought I’d come and sneak you out of here for a few vargas for a break. Red’s right outside, I got Pidge to add cloaking to him so you can get out and back in without anyone noticing.” He looks hesitant. “But if you’d rather not I can just leave—”  
  
“No!”  
  
Lance blinks. Keith flushes.  
  
“I—I’m just—I can’t believe you’re here,” he says, and his shock is so great he doesn’t even care how breathless he sounds. “How did you even get here?”  
  
“Madat,” Lance says. “She was on a mission with us a couple days ago. I’d been trying to figure out a way to visit you for a while now and when I asked her about it she, uh, accidentally told me the coordinates for the base and told me she could let me in whenever I want.” He pauses. “She also lent me her spare blade suit, so remind me that I gotta return this with you when I sneak you back in.”  
  
A small part of Keith is ashamed of how obvious his misery and isolation must be that Madat did all of this without him asking, but the bigger part of him, the part that is basking in Lance’s presence like a cat napping in the sun, is doing its best to mentally transmit a zillion thanks to her.  
  
“So?” Lance prompts, when Keith doesn’t speak. “You coming or not? When she let me in Madat said she’d cut Kolivan’s comm to you so you could sleep for a while, and she could cover for your absence for about four more vargas. It’s not much time but we could fly around with Red for a bit and talk or something.”  
  
Four vargas. Four vargas of being near Lance, of being in the Red Lion again, of not worrying about missions or intel or how many blade members he had to leave behind.  
  
He thinks of how much planning went into this, of Madat risking Kolivan’s wrath and cutting his comm, of Lance remembering what Keith had said about Madat, of pestering Pidge into adding cloaking to the Red Lion, of Hunk telling Lance what he said, of Lance immediately setting out to make him feel better.  
  
He looks at Lance, at his bright brown eyes shining out from the purple hood, and his heart swells about five times too big for his chest.  
  
He smiles.  
  
“Yeah,” he says. He puts up his hood and activates his mask, watching Lance’s answering beam vanish behind purple and black as he activates his mask too. “Let’s go.”

.^.  
  
“I feel like I’m in a bad teen movie,” Keith says a few minutes later as they creep down the hallway.  
  
“Well, we are sneaking out,” Lance says, “and we’re lying about where you’re gonna be the next few hours. If we really wanted to be accurate I’d have thrown pebbles at your window and you’d have climbed down a tree.” He’s walking a little ahead of Keith, so he glances back at him, frowning. “If Kolivan’s in charge of the base, does this make him your dad in this scenario?”  
  
“I think he’s too old for that,” Keith says. They round a corner, tiptoe down another hallway. “Maybe he’s the grandpa.”  
  
“Oh, perfect! Conflict for the main character.” Lance’s voice deepens, as if he’s an announcer in a movie trailer. “All Akira wants is to be free and hang out with his super cool and awesome friend Leandro. But his grandfather is afraid to let him live his own life, because Akira is all he has left.”  
  
“Shut up,” Keith says, though there’s too much of a smile in his words for them to be effective. “You’ll get us caught.”  
  
Lance ignores him. “Madat is the cool older sister,” he goes on, “or maybe she’s our friend who’s pretending we’re at her house for a sleepover while we go out and get into wild shenanigans.”  
  
Keith raises an eyebrow, though with the mask Lance can’t see it. “Wild shenanigans?” he repeats. “I thought the point of this was to help me de-stress. How is that gonna happen if—shit, move!”  
  
He grabs onto the back of Lance’s suit, yanks him out of the hallway and into a smaller side one as a handful of blade members round the corner and pass through. They’re discussing something, but Keith doesn’t notice, because when he pulled Lance out of sight Lance had stumbled backward into him, knocking them both over, and now they’re tangled together against the wall and Keith’s heart is hammering and wow Lance is close, really close, he’s practically sitting in Keith’s lap, and one of Keith’s hands is at Lance’s waist and he kind of wants to slide his arm around him and hug him from behind and he wishes they weren’t wearing their masks because he’s pretty sure if they weren’t his nose would be brushing Lance’s neck and—  
  
“I think they’re gone,” Lance whispers. “Let’s go.”  
  
Keith snaps back to reality.  
  
“Uh—yeah,” he says, fighting the blush rising to his cheeks. Despite wishing they were gone a moment ago he’s immensely grateful for the masks. “Where exactly did you leave Red?”  
  
“Side entrance,” Lance replies, as they hurry out into the bigger hallway. “He’s kinda floating by it so we should be able to just jump into his mouth.”  
  
“Great,” Keith says dryly. “Let’s jump out of the purple alien spy base into a giant red mecha lion that’s hovering in deep space.”  
  
Lance snickers. “Our lives are so weird,” he says, and then, “Ah-ha!”  
  
The door to the side entrance slides open to reveal—nothing.  
  
“Cloaking,” Lance says, which is strange, because he can’t see Keith’s face, but somehow he’s guessed at his momentary confusion anyway, and Keith’s stomach does a happy little flip at the thought that Lance knows him so well even after being apart for so long. “C’mon, let’s jump.”  
  
Keith stares at him, appalled. “ _What_?”  
  
“Red will catch you,” Lance says.  
  
Keith squints at empty space. He trusts Red, really, but it’s still weird.  
  
“Here, I’ll go first,” Lance says, and without waiting for a response he runs down the short platform, jumps, then disappears.  
  
Keith takes a deep breath, clenches his fists, then runs and jumps. He closes his eyes, half expecting to fall and fall and fall—  
  
—but Red catches him, as he always does, though more roughly than usual. Keith lands hard on the floor of the cockpit, bumping into what feels like eighteen different sharp edges.  
  
“Oh god, are you okay?” he hears Lance says from somewhere above him. His voice shakes with laughter. “I think Red’s kinda annoyed you didn’t trust him right away.”  
  
“Mmphgr,” Keith mumbles.  
  
“What?”  
  
He sits up, deactivates his mask and drops his hood in one motion. Lance is crouching on the floor beside him, one hand half reached out as if to touch Keith’s shoulder. His hood is dropped and his mask is already deactivated so Keith can clearly see the concern and mirth mingled in his face.  
  
“I don’t know,” Keith says, then, with a thrill rippling through him at the prospect of making Lance smile, “People in books always say weird shit after they get knocked around so I thought I should say something weird too.”  
  
Lance blinks at him—then barks a laugh. Keith hears another laugh, too, a purring one, poking gently at the back of his mind, and it adds to the warmth already shooting through him. He hadn’t realized what a deadly combination it is to be in the Red Lion again _and_ make Lance laugh. He’s not sure he’s equipped to handle so much happiness at once.  
  
Lance gets to his feet. “All right, Red, let’s go,” he says, sitting in the pilot’s seat. “We’ll go far enough that we can get rid of the cloaking, then just fly around for a bit, okay?” He glances at Keith, who gets up and walks over to stand by pilot’s seat. “Unless you wanna do something else?”  
  
Keith leans his elbow on the top of the pilot’s seat. He looks out of Red’s window, takes in the familiar lighting, the structure, the controls, the somehow still-present presence prodding at his mind. He wonders if Lance knows Red can still sort of speak to him, if he’d be annoyed if he knew. He likes to think he wouldn’t be. Maybe he’d even be excited about it, about sharing his lion with Keith in the way that Keith wants them to share everything.  
  
To his dismay he feels heat flooding his face again. He stares resolutely ahead, thankful for Red’s lighting and pointedly ignoring the amused rumble in the back of his mind.  
  
“Your plan sounds good,” he says finally.  
  
Lance nods. He tugs at the controls, and the Red Lion zooms forward, away from the Blade of Marmora’s base, out into starry darkness.

.^.  
  
The first few minutes are completely silent. Once Lance is far enough away from the base he turns off the cloaking, turns on autopilot so Red is gliding, then pulls up his legs to sit cross-legged, his elbows on his thighs and his chin propped up in his hands. He looks calm, maybe thoughtful.  
  
Keith, on the other hand, is dying.  
  
He wants to say something, to tell Lance about everything that’s happened, even boring dumb shit like what he eats for dinner and what level training bots he’s beaten so far, but he also doesn’t want to break the silence. It’s rare for Lance to be so quiet, but it doesn’t feel nervous; it feels settled, content, like they have all the time in the world to talk.  
  
Which—they don’t. They have four vargas in total and they have to count off time for leaving and coming back to the base and Keith’s stomach is already sinking at the thought of how much time has slipped away, of every passing silent second being one less second where he can be here with Lance, away from the base and the blade members and being miserable and—  
  
He feels Red grumble, exasperated and fond, and he’s about to tell him to shut up when Lance speaks.  
  
“I have a sword now,” he says.  
  
That startles him.  
  
“You have a _what_?” Keith asks, certain he had misheard.  
  
Lance looks up at him. “A sword,” he repeats. The corner of his mouth quirks up. “See?”  
  
In a flash he draws his bayard and instead of a basic gun or a sniper rifle it’s a sword, it’s a fucking sword, and Lance sits up on his knees and waves it around, making _whoosh_ noises with his mouth like he’s playing with a toy lightsaber, and it’s a peculiar mix of hot and adorable and Keith’s pretty sure his heart stops because holy fucking shit Lance has a _sword_ —  
  
Another flash and it’s gone. Lance sits back down and resumes his earlier position.  
  
“Allura says it’s an Altean broadsword,” he says, oblivious to Keith’s gaping. “Her dad used one too so she’s gonna teach me how to use it properly.”  
  
“That’s—” Keith’s voice cracks. “That’s cool.”  
  
Lance peeks at him. “Is it?”  
  
“Yeah, dude.” He realizes, belatedly, that he hadn’t said anything when Lance had been showing it off, which probably looks bad. He hurries to remedy that. “You have three forms for your bayard now! That’s incredible. No one else has even managed to unlock two and you have _three_.”  
  
Lance’s smile is almost shy. “I guess.” He looks out of Red’s window again. “No one else knows except Allura.”  
  
Keith frowns. When Lance had unlocked his sniper rifle he had run around the castle ship yelling about it for almost a full varga.  
  
“Don’t you want to show it off?” he asks.  
  
Lance shrugs. “Not really.”  
  
Keith’s frown deepens. He feels like he’s missing something, like if he could just get one more hint this would make sense—  
  
“It’s not like it’s anything they haven’t seen before,” Lance adds.  
  
Oh. _Oh_.  
  
“Yeah it is,” Keith says fiercely. “That’s an actual sword, with an actual handle, and it’s fucking huge, and it’s the same kind of sword King Alfor had. We haven’t seen that before.”  
  
Lance peeks at him again, then hurriedly returns to looking out of the window.  
  
“I guess,” he says again, and Keith feels frustration boil in his gut, because it’s a big deal, it’s a huge deal, Lance should be proud of this and proud of himself and confident in himself and he shouldn’t be sitting here so weirdly quiet and Keith wishes he were better at words and—  
  
—and it occurs to him that if he can’t properly comfort Lance then he can at least say something stupid to shake him out of this mood.  
  
“Your sword is way bigger than mine,” he blurts, before he can chicken out. “ _Way_ bigger. It’s a lot more impressive.”  
  
Lance sits up. He turns his head to squint at Keith, who stares back and tries his best not to fidget.  
  
“Was that,” Lance says slowly, a smile spreading across his face, “a dick joke?”  
  
Keith channels his best Kolivan face, but he thinks his mouth twitches, because Lance’s smile is suddenly enormous. He sits up on his knees again and points at Keith.  
  
“HA!” he yells. “Hunk was right! Galra Keith is way funnier than regular Keith!”  
  
“Oh my god,” Keith says, rolling his eyes, but then Lance does the first part of that dumb dance he had done in the kitchen so many months ago, his fists held close to his chest as he rotates on his knees from side to side, and Keith’s façade cracks. He grins at first, and then Red tires of Lance moving around so much in the pilot’s seat and jolts enough that Lance falls out of the chair, and then Keith can’t stop laughing, he’s holding onto the top of the chair so he won’t fall over and Lance is yelling indignantly at Red and Red keeps jolting and grumbling about _youths these days_ and Keith feels like he might pass out if he doesn’t stop laughing because he can’t even breathe.  
  
When he finally does calm down he sees Lance sitting in the pilot’s seat in the Red-approved way, looking up at him with a dopey smile on his face.  
  
“What?” Keith asks, still out of breath.  
  
Lance’s smile grows dopier.  
  
“I’m happy you’re happy,” he says.  
  
Keith feels his own smile fade. Lance looks away, out of the window.  
  
“Sorry,” he says. “That was weird.”  
  
“No, it’s—it’s fine.”  
  
There is a beat. In the sudden silence Keith realizes how tired his legs are; he sits on the floor beside the pilot’s chair, cross-legged.  
  
“Hey, you don’t have to do that,” Lance says, glancing around. He starts to get up. “I’m sure we can find something for you to sit on, like a container or box or something, there’s some in the back—”  
  
“I’m okay,” Keith assures him, then, as Lance sits back down, “How is everyone doing?”  
  
“We’re all good,” Lance says. “It’s been weird cause now Lotor just,” he throws out a hand, makes a face, “hangs out in the castle ship with us, but Pidge and Matt got their dad back, which is nice.”  
  
Keith had forgotten Lotor was living in the castle ship. He doesn’t really like the idea of it. “What’s it like having Lotor there?”  
  
Lance make a disgusted sound, something between _ugh_ and _yuck_. Keith snickers.  
  
“That bad?”  
  
“Fuckin’ demon-ass motherfucker,” Lance says bluntly.  
  
Keith laughs again, properly this time. “I can’t believe you’ve finally found someone you hate more than me.”  
  
He expects Lance to go along with it, to say something like _not more than you, almost as much as you_ , or _yeah I didn’t think that was possible_ or something equally jokey and not at all serious, but Lance’s eyes widen.  
  
“I never hated you!” he says, and he sounds so urgently sincere that Keith’s breath catches. “I was annoyed by you, and I kinda resented you, but I never _hated_ you! And I like you now. I’ve liked you for a really long time. We’re friends.”  
  
Keith doesn’t really know how to respond to that, not when his heart is doing gymnastics in his chest, not when he wants to say dumb soft stupid shit like _I like you too, you’re my friend too, but I think it’s more than that, because talking to Hunk or Allura or Pidge or Shiro doesn’t make me feel the way that talking to you does, when I talk to you I feel like I’d take down the moon and the stars and the sun if you asked, and it wouldn’t matter if they were all gone cause you’re bright enough to replace all of them, and_ —  
  
( _dude_ , says an angry part of his mind, harshly, _what the hell is wrong with you, are you sick or something_?)  
  
( _I am sick_ , says another part of his mind, _lovesick_ , and he tells both parts of his brain to shut up before he starts blushing)  
  
He’s taken too long to respond. Lance looks away again.  
  
“Sorry,” he says once more. “I made it weird again.” He sounds frustrated. “I came here so you’d be happy, not weirded out every five seconds, sorry—”  
  
“It’s okay,” Keith interrupts. “You—you’re my friend too. I was just surprised.”  
  
Lance meets his gaze. “Oh.”  
  
Another beat.  
  
“What else has happened?” Keith asks. “There’s weeks you have to tell me about. What’s everyone been doing? Did you freak out Allura and Coran again with milkshakes?”  
  
Lance brightens. “Yeah! Pidge and Matt made some the other day and they both freaked out about it, it was pretty funny…”  
  
Lance proceeds to catch him up on everything that’s happened since Naxzela. Keith has a feeling he’s leaving a lot out, but he doesn’t want to push, so he lets Lance ramble about Hunk’s latest engineering project and Pidge’s excitement at having her dad back and Allura’s continued status as a glowing ethereal goddess of light and a word-for-word account of every time he’s insulted Lotor.  
  
In return Keith tells him what he’s been doing lately, too. Keith’s stories are stilted, and much less funny, and after a sentence or two he starts to worry he’s boring Lance because his voice is so much flatter and his anecdotes are so much drier, but Lance listens so intently, and asks him questions, and laughs and gasps and goes “ _no_!” in all the right spots, and Keith finds himself talking faster, growing more comfortable with talking so much for so long.  
  
When they’re done talking they sit in silence for a minute or two. Lance turns to look out of the window. Sometime during their conversation he had slid down in his seat and pulled up his feet, turning sideways so his feet are tucked against one side of the chair and his elbows rest on the arm on the opposite side, his cheek squished against his arm. There’s a warm contentment settled deep in Keith’s bones, something he’s only felt a couple of times before, something that accompanies the hoarse throat and happy exhaustion of talking to someone he likes. It makes him reckless, though a different kind of reckless than trying to fight Zarkon on his own or running through room after room of armed blade members. It’s the kind of reckless that makes him stare unashamedly at Lance when he would normally only sneak glances, the kind of reckless that makes him take in the curly hair, the long lashes, even the baby fat on his face that’s visible now that his cheek is squished against his arm, and makes him want to say aloud some of the dumb soft stupid shit that he usually keeps locked away.  
  
So reckless, in fact, that his mouth is open and the words are half formed when Lance suddenly sits up and says, “I’m starving. Do you want snacks?”  
  
Keith snaps his mouth shut.  
  
“Yeah,” he says. “That sounds good.”  
  
“Cool.” Lance points at a compartment behind Keith. “There should be some stuff in there, I think it’s mostly Arusian pudding and Olkari chips.”  
  
Keith pops open the compartment and pulls out a couple pudding cups and bags of chips, leaving them on the floor between himself and the pilot’s chair. Lance stretches out an arm for a purple pudding cup, which he opens with relish. Keith checks the compartment to see if there’s anything else in there, but the only other thing inside is a tiny button. He glances at Lance, who is still engrossed in his pudding, then turns back to the button and pushes it.  
  
A tiny drawer pops out above the compartment. Keith sits up on his knees to look inside. From behind him he hears Lance squeak.  
  
“Wait—” Lance sounds frantic. “Wait, don’t look in there—”  
  
The warning comes too late. Keith stares at the piece of paper in the drawer, at the lines of Lance’s face that he drew so many months ago, now smudged and creased from when he had folded it. Without really meaning to he reaches for the drawing, unable to believe Lance still has it, that Lance has kept it all this time, but before he can touch it Lance jumps past him and slams the drawer shut.  
  
“What the hell,” Keith says, annoyed. “My hand was right there, dude, I could have caught my fingers in that.”  
  
“I told you not to look!” Lance says, too loud in his outrage. His expression is an odd mix of terrified and furious. “Why would you look, I told you not to—”  
  
“It was just lying there!” Keith says defensively. “It was right there, how the fuck could I have not seen it—”  
  
“You shouldn’t have pushed the button in the first place!” Lance says, still too loud, still looking terrified and furious. “Why the hell would you just poke around in someone else’s stuff, what is wrong with you—”  
  
“—I’m sorry, okay, I just pushed it—”  
  
“—shouldn’t just snoop around like that, it’s fucking rude—”  
  
“—Lance—”  
  
“—probably think I’m some kind of weirdo now—”  
  
Keith frowns. “What?”  
  
Lance breaks off, stares down at him belligerently. Keith sits back down, cross-legged again.  
  
“Why would I think you’re a weirdo?” he asks.  
  
Lance looks like he’s going to say something, but he just shakes his head and goes back to the pilot’s seat. He picks up his abandoned pudding cup and eats it with a focus that must be unprecedented in the history of pudding consumption.  
  
“Lance.”  
  
“It doesn’t matter,” Lance says abruptly, still intent on the pudding. “Forget I said anything, it’s fine.”  
  
“Lance,” Keith says again, though he doesn’t really know what he wants to say next.  
  
“It doesn’t matter,” Lance says again. He puts down the pudding cup and turns to Keith with a determined look. “Aren’t you gonna eat too?”  
  
“I’m fine.”  
  
Something flickers in Lance’s gaze, too subtle for Keith to understand. “Are you sure?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
There is yet another silence, this one longer than any of the others. Lance looks out of the window again, and Keith looks down at his lap. He feels awkward, unsettled, and he thinks maybe he should take one of the snacks after all, if only to smooth over the disconnect of the last few minutes, because he hates being like this again with Lance, like they’re pieces from two different puzzles trying to fit together. They’ve been doing so well lately, they’ve been comfortable and content, and he wishes he knew how to fix this, wishes he could undo the last minute and not push that stupid button.  
  
Lance makes a sound, a growly sort of _ugh_. Keith looks up, alarmed, to see him cover his face with his hands.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Lance says, voice muffled by his hands. “I’m sorry, this is really awful. I wanted to come bust you out and fly you around so you’d have a break and feel better but I’m just making it worse.” He drops his hands into his lap and Keith realizes, with a nasty jolt, that Lance’s face is screwed up, as if he’s trying not to cry. “I can just fly you back now if you want.”  
  
“We still have another varga,” Keith says, trying to control his rising panic. He’s never seen Lance cry, never even seen him come close to it, and he isn’t sure he’s equipped to deal with it. “And it’s fine, really, you don’t have to keep apologizing—”  
  
“Yes I do!” Lance bursts out. “I try to help people but I always just make it worse, I ruin ev”—his voice cracks—“everything—”  
  
He stops, takes a deep breath, covers his face with his hands again.  
  
“Sorry,” he says, and Keith is starting to hate this word for how often it comes out of Lance’s mouth unwarranted. Lance laughs once, short and self-deprecating, and when he speaks again his voice wavers, strained with suppressed tears. “This is really embarrassing.”  
  
He sniffs and takes a deep breath, and Keith can see how shaky it is, can see how hard it is for Lance to keep himself together, and he hates it, and he hates himself for just sitting here staring at him instead of _doing_ something, but he doesn’t know what to do—  
  
“Do you want a hug?” he blurts.  
  
Lance peeks at him through his fingers.  
  
“What?” he says incredulously.  
  
“Um, I just—” Keith shifts his weight; he feels uncomfortably warm all of a sudden. “Shiro said his mama told him that everything can be fixed with a hug, which I think is an exaggeration cause it obviously can’t fix stuff like broken bones, but I thought—I don’t know, sometimes it helps with stuff like this so I thought I’d ask—but I’m not very good at hugging so you probably don’t want—”  
  
Lance slides down to the floor, scoots over next to him, then puts his arms around him and tucks his face against Keith’s shoulder.  
  
“—to,” Keith finishes. He feels strangely breathless; his heart hammers in his chest. For a moment he’s frozen, too overwhelmed too move, but he regains his wits enough to put one arm around Lance and adjust so they fit together better. Lance is warm, and the weight of him against Keith’s side is comforting, and his hair tickles Keith’s cheek, and it smells nice, smells like Altean shampoo, makes Keith think of the castle ship, of the familiarity of it, makes him think of words like _home_.  
  
He swallows, tells himself to stop being stupid. He makes a fist with his free hand and runs his thumb along the side of his index finger, over and over and over, tries to calm his erratic heartbeat, tries to dispel thoughts that are too soft and too sweet to have when Lance is literally in his arms, thoughts of tipping his head down to lean his forehead on Lance’s, of closing his eyes and breathing in the scent of Altean shampoo and the castle ship and home.  
  
He doesn’t know how long they sit like that, still and silent. It’s not long, because even when he’s upset Lance is still Lance, still someone who notices when others are distressed. He pulls away—it takes everything Keith has not to protest, not to follow, to let Lance’s arms unwind from around him and to let his own arm fall from around Lance—and when he does so his head is bent, his eyes fixed on Keith’s fist, on the thumb running frantically over the index finger.  
  
“Is this too much?” he asks, gaze flicking up to meet Keith’s. He looks distressed again, perhaps even more so than before. “Shit, I’m sorry—”  
  
“Stop saying that,” Keith interrupts, so fiercely that Lance blinks with surprise, his mouth snapping shut. “Just stop—you don’t—” He takes a deep breath, clenches his fist tighter, then unclenches it entirely. “You don’t have to keep apologizing. It’s okay to—not be okay.”  
  
Lance smiles, small and a bit sad. “Thanks.”  
  
There is a pause, then Keith says, very slowly, “Did something happen today?”  
  
Lance hesitates, for so long that Keith starts to second-guess asking in the first place.  
  
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to—”  
  
“Shiro yelled at me,” Lance says, all at once, the phrase loud and rushed and sending a shock through Keith, because it doesn’t make sense, it _can’t_ make sense, “in front of everyone. He was arguing with Allura and I could tell she was getting overwhelmed so I tried to calm him down but then he—” He waves a hand. “You know.”  
  
Except Keith doesn’t know, because Shiro doesn’t yell at people, not ever. He had asked him about it once, years ago when they first became friends, and Shiro had said he doesn’t yell because too many people, especially men, use it to scare others into listening just because they’re bigger and louder.  
  
“Shiro doesn’t yell,” Keith says.  
  
“Are you saying I’m lying?” Lance demands.  
  
“No!” Keith says hastily. “No, I just meant—something’s wrong.”  
  
“Something weird did happen today,” Lance says, “when we were fighting this monster on Olkarion.”  
  
He recounts the story for Keith, who can only shrug at Shiro calling out to him in the astral realm. When Lance is done they both sit for a moment, quiet once more.  
  
“So,” Keith says finally, “what other bad stuff have you been keeping from me?”  
  
Lance laughs, though it’s more of a hiccup. “That’s the worst of it,” he says, then, suddenly, as if he’s just now remembering, “You’re keeping something from me, too.”  
  
Keith blinks.  
  
“I haven’t talked to Matt yet about whatever it is you were worried about us finding out about,” Lance goes on, “so I’m still waiting in dread for whatever that’ll turn out to be. Unless you want to—”  
  
“No,” Keith interrupts, suppressing the renewed flare of panic at the topic. “I’m not gonna—no.” He sees Lance’s face, the worry and trepidation, and says, more gently, “Not yet.”  
  
Lance still looks worried, but he just nods. He gets to his feet, turns to the control panel and checks one of the screens.  
  
“We have a little more than half a varga left,” he says. “We should probably start heading back.”  
  
Keith’s stomach drops.  
  
“Yeah, okay,” he says, and Lance turns off autopilot, settles back down in the pilot’s chair, and turns Red around to head back to the base.

.^.  
  
To their surprise the trip back only takes a couple minutes—Red zooms through space at a speed Keith has missed since joining the blade, and he finds himself grinning the whole time as they approach the base. They hover just outside the zone where Lance would have to turn on the cloaking, unwilling to cut their time short.  
  
Red purrs in the back of Keith’s mind, the first thing he’s said since Lance’s goofy dance. It’s warm and tender, with vague vibes of _miss you_ and _happy you came_.  
  
_Me too_ , Keith thinks at him.  
  
Red purrs again, _next time_ and _trust me_ and _no trust then won’t catch you and you fall through space_.  
  
_I’m sorry_! Keith thinks, contrite. _The invisibility is unnerving_.  
  
Red rumbles, a chuckle and a sigh.  
  
“Thank you for this,” Keith says out loud. He’s back to standing by Lance’s chair. “It was nice to get out for a while.”  
  
Lance looks up at him. “It’s no problem,” he says. “Though I don’t know how much fun it was to hear me talk for a zillion hours and then have half a breakdown.”  
  
“It was,” Keith says firmly, then, “Wait—no—I don’t mean it was fun that you were upset—”  
  
Lance snickers. “Smooth.”  
  
Keith pokes his shoulder but otherwise ignores his comment. “I meant that it’s fine. You said we’re friends, right? Friends talk about stuff, even if it’s bad.”  
  
“Never thought I’d see the day you give me friendship advice,” Lance mumbles.  
  
Keith pokes his shoulder again.  
  
“ _Stop_ ,” Lance says, wriggling away from him. The pilot’s chair doesn’t let him go far but he squishes as far as he can on the other side of it. “This is biphobia.”  
  
“What—” Keith breaks off with a laugh. “How is this biphobia?”  
  
“Anything that inconveniences me is biphobia,” Lance declares. “Your finger is biphobic.” He crosses his arms. “The whole universe is biphobic.”  
  
“The whole universe?” Keith repeats, amused. “What did the universe do?”  
  
“Too big,” Lance says grumpily. “Keeps me away from people I like.”  
  
Keith’s humor fades. He wishes he could say something here, something like _I’m sure you’ll get to see your family soon_ or _maybe you all can visit earth sometime_ , but those feel like lies.  
  
So he just says, “Yeah. That sucks.”  
  
Lance looks up at him. “Do you think you could ever visit us sometime?” he asks. “Even just for a little bit? Like a few hours or something?”  
  
Keith blinks. For a second he’s confused at what this has to do with their current conversation, but then—  
  
“Did you mean _me_?” he blurts, and as he hears the words come out of his mouth he realizes how stupid they are, because of course Lance doesn’t mean him, he’s just changing the subject, it’s not like Keith is part of the people that Lance likes that the supposedly biphobic universe is keeping away from him, and wow this is humiliating, and—  
  
“Yeah,” Lance says, and considering what a soft thing it is to admit his voice is almost belligerent. It doesn’t help that his arms are still crossed. “I did.”  
  
For a long second they just stare at each other. Then Lance makes a weird noise, the same growly _ugh_ from before, except this time instead of covering his face he throws his arms out.  
  
“Okay, I’m just gonna say it!” he shouts. “I really miss you! I know I told you that already after Naxzela but I’m telling you again cause it really sucks not having you around and I miss talking to you and doing dumb stuff with you and I wish you’d come back and I wanted something of yours so it can kinda feel like you’re still with m—with us—and that’s why I keep your drawing in here!”  
  
He drops his arms into his lap and snaps his mouth shut, and Keith knows this is probably a really terrifying thing for Lance to say, and he should respond accordingly, but it feels like someone’s just given him an electric shock, and he can’t stop smiling, and there’s something so wonderfully familiar about Lance yelling nice things, so he says, “I kind of thought you kept the drawing so you’d be able to look at your own face whenever you want.”  
  
Lance’s face screws up, and it feels like sirens go off in Keith’s brain, _warning_ and _why are you so fucking incompetent_ and _if you make him cry you might as well throw yourself out into space you horrible piece of scum_.  
  
“I’m not making fun of you!” he bursts out, panicked. “Don’t be mad, I’m not making fun of you, I swear!”  
  
Lance’s face slowly returns to normal. He squints suspiciously. “You’re smiling too much.”  
  
“I’m happy,” Keith says, and he can hear how different he sounds, speaking through a smile, can feel how much his cheeks hurt from trying to talk and smile at the same time, the kind of hurt that he doesn’t mind, the kind of hurt that he wishes he felt more often. “This is what people do when they’re happy.”  
  
“ _Okay_ ,” Lance says, rolling his eyes, but he’s smiling now too, and they’re staring at each other again, two boys smiling like fools, and the warm contentment settles in Keith’s bones again, and it makes him feel reckless again, and the dumb soft stupid shit bubbles up his throat again, and he forgets that they’re soldiers, in an intergalactic war, in a magical mecha lion, floating in space right before he has to return to a spy base.  
  
He is warm, and content, and reckless, and he forgets, and he opens his mouth to speak, and he doesn’t even know what he’s going to say but he feels compelled to say it, to tell him—  
  
“I should change,” Lance says. “You gotta return this suit to Madat.”  
  
“Y-yeah,” Keith stammers. His heart beats too fast; he can’t believe he was about to do it again, was about to risk this, whatever this is that he has with Lance, this rivalry-turned-partnership-turned-friendship, for the sake of neck-and-neck turned to side-by-side-turned to—something. “Okay.”  
  
Lance gets up and walks over to a box in the back of his lion. He opens it—Keith can see the armor within—then without preamble starts to unzip his blade suit.  
  
“Wha—” Keith chokes, feeling a blush race over his face. He turns away, staring determinedly out of the window. “Dude, give me a warning.”  
  
Lance glances back at him. He laughs.  
  
“I’m wearing clothes underneath!” he says. “I’m wearing the bodysuit. Did you really think I was naked?”  
  
Keith’s blush deepens. He remains where he is; despite knowing that Lance is fully clothed he still feels weirdly flustered. “I don’t know, I was just—it was just really sudden.”  
  
Lance chuckles. Keith hears the clink of the armor as he lifts it out of the box, hears the rustle of Lance sliding it on and the clicks of him fastening the sides.  
  
“Hey,” Lance says, between clicks. “Does this mean you’re naked under your suit?”  
  
Keith swears he can hear the eyebrow waggle in Lance’s voice. He doesn’t reply.  
  
“Oh my god,” Lance says, laughing again. “Are you really—Keith, _no_ , these suits are disgusting. Why aren’t you wearing anything underneath?”  
  
“I have boxers,” Keith mumbles, but that only makes Lance laugh harder.  
  
“You’re so gross,” he says, then, “Okay I’m all dressed, no need to be bashful anymore.”  
  
“I’m not _bashful_ ,” Keith protests, even as shyness shoots through him again at the memory of Lance unzipping the suit.  
  
He turns around. Lance is in his blue armor again; he strikes a pose, like some kind of dashing knight in a myth.  
  
“Goodbye Marmorite Lance,” he says, his voice pitched comically deep. “Hello, Dashing Paladin Lance.”  
  
Keith rolls his eyes and tells himself he didn’t just call Lance dashing in his mind. “You’re so dumb.”  
  
Lance folds up the blade suit and puts it atop the box before responding. When he does the word is more of a sigh. “Yeah.”  
  
Keith frowns.  
  
“You’re not actually dumb,” he says. “I didn’t mean that you’re stupid, I meant that you’re—goofy.”  
  
“Yeah,” Lance says again, “I got it,” but the words are still resigned, and there’s probably only a few minutes left before Keith has to leave, and he really needs to make this clear before he goes, because Lance is so good at so many things, is so wonderful and so fantastic and so—perfect—and Keith doesn’t understand how he can’t see how perfect he is, and he wants to tell Lance—but he’s bad at words, he’s so bad at words—but he’s bad at hugs too, or so he had thought, but Lance had taken his hug anyway, had let Keith hold him close—so maybe he’s not so bad at it, or maybe it doesn’t matter if he’s bad at it, because Lance is his partner, his friend, his—something—and he knows that even if Keith is the worst in the world at something, he’s trying because he cares.  
  
So Keith takes a deep breath, clenches his fist and lets his thumb run over his index finger once, twice, thrice, then unclenches his fist and speaks.  
  
“It’s not a bad thing,” he says, or rather hears himself say; he feels stilted, detached in his inexperience with this kind of conversation and desperate in his desire to plunge into it anyway. He stares at the floor, too nervous to look at Lance as he speaks. “It’s good that you’re goofy and that you do dumb stuff, because it—it’s nice. It helps everyone loosen up and it makes us all laugh and I—like it.” He swallows, forces past the sudden surge of embarrassment to keep going. “I like it a lot, actually. You make me laugh more than anyone else here. Anyone else I’ve ever met. Which is saying a lot cause Shiro’s dad jokes are actually pretty funny.”  
  
He pauses, expects Lance to interject, to snort or scoff or say _no they’re not_. But Lance doesn’t react, doesn’t say anything at all, and Keith is still nervous to look at him, so he continues.  
  
“So—and—and you’re good at other stuff too, you’re not the just the funny guy. You’re our sharpshooter and you—you have a fucking _sword_ now, and I haven’t seen you use it for real but I bet you’re great with it, cause you—you’re great with everything.”  
  
Still no response. It’s a little terrifying now, this completely and total silence from someone usually so completely and totally loud, but Keith can’t make himself stop now. It’s as if someone’s taken over him, as if months and months and months of awe and admiration and amazement have finally overflowed, pouring out of him in waves.  
  
“And I don’t mean that you’re the best at everything,” he goes on, “cause no one can be like that, but you’re definitely the best at—at figuring out who’s the best at whatever it is that the team needs, which is honestly a lot more important cause you know who should lead at what time, and—and you know how to defuse situations, like that time Pidge accidentally insulted the Qivrian queen and you smoothed it over with jokes, and you always stand up for people even if it means you get made fun of or yelled at, like with Hunk and the Julkar diplomat or Allura and Shiro earlier today, and you’re—really good with kids and that helps a ton when we deal with younger prisoners or refugees and you’re our best strategist and you—you—”  
  
He breaks off, takes another deep breath, orders himself to look at Lance for this next part. When he does he’s startled, not by what he sees but by what he _doesn’t_ see—he’s not sure what he expected, but it was surely not this, not this blank slate, this complete expressionlessness. He doesn’t know what it means for Lance to look so blank; it’s unnerving on a face so usually mobile, but Keith doesn’t let himself think about it too much. He pushes forward, the words tumbling out.  
  
“You helped me a lot,” he says, “when I was Black Paladin, and—you were—really the only reason I was able to do it—cause you calmed me down and reminded me to stick with the team and you—you were—you were—you—”  
  
Why can’t he say it, he wants to say it, he needs to say it, it doesn’t matter that his voice is starting to shake a little and his eyes are sort of kind of stinging and what the fuck what the fuck why is he getting like this he shouldn’t be getting this emotional over thanking Lance what the fuck is wrong with him—  
  
“After Shiro disappeared that second time I felt like I was alone again and it was worse cause I—I thought my luck had run out—cause there’s only so many times you can lose someone and find them again—and it was awful, it was so fucking awful, cause I only have one person and he was taken from me again and then you—and then you were there and you made sure I ate enough and you tried to talk to me even when I was acting like an asshole and you helped me realize that moving on and finding a new Black Paladin doesn’t mean forgetting about Shiro and I—I realized I wasn’t alone anymore and that even if I didn’t find Shiro again I wouldn’t be alone because I had everyone—because I—”  
  
He knows what’s going to come out of his mouth next and no fuck shit wait no _no_ he shouldn’t say it he shouldn’t he shouldn’t he _shouldn’t_ it sounds too—too—but he can’t stop talking, the gates have opened and the flood is pouring out, wave after wave after wave—  
  
“—because I had you.”  
  
He stops and he feels like there’s still so much more to say but he’s run out of breath so he pauses to try to inhale and then—  
  
—and then—  
  
—and then it’s like something out of a dream—  
  
—one moment Lance is standing in front of him, unmoving and expression still oddly blank, and then in the next moment something raw and intense passes over his face, and he moves towards Keith, reaches out for his arm and pulls him towards him in one sudden, fluid motion—  
  
—and his mouth lands on Keith’s—  
  
—and kissing Lance is somehow everything and nothing how he’d imagined it—  
  
—everything because it feels like an electric shock runs through him from head to toe, everything because his heart is thudding and Lance’s mouth is sweet and his arms wind around Keith’s torso and Keith is gripping the shoulders he’s admired for so long—  
  
—nothing because the kiss is slightly off center, because he doesn’t know what he’s doing so he just presses his lips against Lance’s as best he can, because his nose is kind of squashed against Lance’s, because he still hasn’t breathed, because he forgets that he can breathe through his nose, because he feels dizzy both from the kiss and lack of oxygen and he ends up having to pull back and gasp in a breath, huge and gulping.  
  
(even with all this, even with the bad aim and the crammed noses and the held breath, it’s still everything. it’s still everything, and it’s still perfect, and Keith wouldn’t trade this for anything else.)  
  
He doesn’t stop to check what Lance looks like or if he’s going to say something; he tips his head up and kisses him again, and this time it’s better, this time he remembers to breathe, this time Lance’s hands slide up to cup his face, and he doesn’t know which of them does it but one of them tilts his head a little and suddenly everything is much smoother, their noses aren’t squashed and their lips are moving together instead of just pressing against each other, and Keith is floating, floating, floating and his toes are curling and somehow his hands are in Lance’s hair, tangled in his curls, and Lance’s lips are soft and his skin is warm and then Keith touches his face, feels Lance’s jaw move as he kisses him, and it’s gentle and wonderful and he’s dizzy with all the little pinpricks of happiness shooting through him, tiny stars lighting him up from the inside.  
  
When they break apart it’s slow, their lips lingering, brushing against each other. Keith slides his hands down to Lance’s neck, opens eyes he doesn’t remember closing, sees that Lance’s eyes are still closed, sees the lopsided grin on his face. He feels flushed, and shy, and he tries to breathe, tries to set his world right when Lance has knocked it so thoroughly out of orbit.  
  
He wants to say something, _that was really nice_ or _I like you a lot_ or maybe something fancier, something stupidly romantic like _I would fight the entire empire by myself if you asked_ , but when he opens his mouth what comes out is, “Holy shit.”  
  
Lance opens his eyes. His grin widens—then vanishes completely.  
  
“Oh my god,” he says, and Keith feels like a rug’s been pulled out from under his feet, because if Lance is like this, eyes wide and anxious, voice panicked and horrified, then something must be wrong, which means he didn’t like the kiss, or didn’t want it to begin with, and shit shit shit Keith’s probably been reading this all wrong and—  
  
“This is your first kiss!” Lance goes on, with dismay.  
  
—what?  
  
“What?” Keith says aloud.  
  
“I stole your first kiss!” Lance says, distraught. “In the Red Lion! In the middle of fucking nowhere!” He lets go of Keith, takes a few steps back, puts his hands to his head, drags them down over his face, lets them fall to his sides. “Ugh, shit, I’m so sorry, I know you wanted it to be special and I just—fucking _stole_ it—out of the blue—I’m really sorry—”  
  
Keith thinks he might petition to have the word _sorry_ banned from Lance’s vocabulary.  
  
“Lance,” he says, but Lance barrels onward.

“—at the very least I should have stolen it somewhere romantic,” he says, pacing frantically back and forth in front of Keith. He seems to be speaking more to himself than to Keith. “Like after a big battle, or at a parade or a party, or—or one of those planets Allura told us about, the ones with the pretty constellations and the silvery forests—I should have at least taken you there, it’d have been really romantic—”  
  
It would be romantic, Keith thinks. He wonders if they could go sometime, maybe if Lance sneaks in again or if he manages to get permission to visit the castle ship.  
  
“Lance,” he says a second time, but again he’s ignored.  
  
Lance is still rambling. “—though I don’t even know if this is still your first kiss, cause that conversation was a really long time ago and you could have made out with some alien dudes between now and then, though I hope you haven’t, though obviously that’s your prerogative, though I am gonna need their names and addresses so I can fight them for your affection, though—”  
  
“LANCE.”  
  
Lance stops, mid-step and mid-sentence. He turns to face Keith, expression somehow sheepish and full of dread at the same time.  
  
“You didn’t steal my first kiss,” Keith begins, but before he can go on Lance makes a despairing noise.  
  
“ _No_!” he exclaims. “I was afraid of this—Hunk told me I should tell you right away but I was too nervous and now look!” He crosses his arms, looking murderous. “Who is he?” he demands. “I bet he’s not as cool as me. I bet he doesn’t like you as much as I do. I’ll fight him for you. I’ll kill him!” He pauses. “Well, no, I won’t kill him, that’d probably make Voltron look bad. I’ll just gently maim him.”  
  
“Calm _down_ ,” Keith says, suppressing the laughter threatening to burst out of him. Lance is so belligerent, so adorably belligerent, all puffed up like an angry cat, and Keith can’t believe he’s willing to fight a random alien over him. It’s so dumb, so dumb and so sweet. “This was still my first kiss.”  
  
Lance deflates, uncrosses his arms, breathes out a relieved, “Oh.”  
  
“I just meant that you didn’t steal it,” Keith explains. “I—” He falters, suddenly shy. “I liked it.”  
  
“ _Oh_ ,” Lance says again, eyes widening.  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
There is a pause, during which Keith has the passing, _embarrassing_ thought that a stolen first kiss sounds terribly romantic—like something from a book—like that scene from the Altean romance he’d read, when Yaffral had climbed up to Prince Gayan’s window and kissed him through it. He shoves the thought down, files it away for examination at some later time, with the vague note to see if there’s a way he could contrive to do something like that with Lance.  
  
“I thought you wanted it to be special,” Lance says finally. “A big romantic first kiss.”  
  
“And it was,” Keith says. He waves a hand at the window. “There are stars, and we’re in a lion we’re both bonded with, and—and you snuck me out of the base.”  
  
“You did give me a big speech,” Lance says, thoughtful. “Hm. I guess it was pretty romantic.”  
  
He flashes a grin, takes a step towards Keith, then another, then another, until he’s as close as he had been before. Keith’s heart launches into its gymnastics once more; Lance cups his face, smiles at him, wide and unrestrained, and Keith thinks his heart might flip right out of his chest and into Lance’s arms. He smiles back, so big he can feel his cheeks push against Lance’s palms.  
  
“I,” Lance begins, then stops, his eyes widening. “Oh my god, Keith.”  
  
Keith’s smile vanishes. “What?”  
  
“You have _baby fat_ ,” Lance says, and he laughs, and it’s literally the last thing in the universe Keith had expected him to say. He stares at him, perplexed, as Lance presses his thumbs into his cheeks, laughing again. “You have squishy cheeks!” He presses his thumbs in again as he speaks. “Squish squish squish.”  
  
“Stop,” Keith says, though he doesn’t make any effort to move, and he sounds too happy for the word to have an effect. “You have them too.” He cups Lance’s face in his hands, pokes his thumbs into Lance’s cheeks. “See?”  
  
“No I don’t!” Lance says indignantly. “I have the chiseled jawline of an Adonis.”  
  
Keith snorts.  
  
“How dare you!” Lance says, outraged. “You have to think I’m the handsomest man in the entire universe. That’s a basic rule of being someone’s boyfriend.”  
  
Keith wants to say _since when is there a rulebook_ or _of course I think you’re the handsomest man in the universe having squishy cheeks doesn’t change that_ but he can’t when his brain is stuck giving him Lance’s last word over and over again.  
  
So he just echoes, “Boyfriend?”  
  
“Yeah,” Lance says, and voice is so soft, so earnestly sincere that Keith has to work to focus on what he’s saying and not how sweet he sounds as he says it. “In case you couldn’t tell from all the kissing, I like you a lot. And I want to be your boyfriend, if—if that’s okay with you.”  
  
(is it possible to explode from happiness? a supernova brought on by a beaming, bright, brown-eyed boy saying he wants you?)  
  
“I like you too,” Keith says, “and I want to be—yeah.”  
  
Lance beams, and he looks so wildly happy that Keith’s heart sinks at what he has to say next.  
  
“But I don’t know how we could do that,” he says, with a prickle of guilt. “Cause I’m not ready to leave the blade, not yet.”  
  
For a split second Lance’s face falls, but then it brightens again.  
  
“We’ll make it work,” he says determinedly. “I’ll see if I can sneak in a second time, and you can try to sneak out or ask permission to visit us, and we’ll go on cheesy dates on weird planets, and—and here—”  
  
He lets go of Keith and turns to a compartment by the box that had held his armor. He opens it, takes out a tablet, and holds it out to Keith.  
  
“Hunk rigged a bunch of these to link directly to anyone’s tablet on the castle ship, plus the main screen on the control deck. You can text on it, too. It’s meant for planet leaders and diplomats and stuff but I don’t think anyone would mind if I gave one to you.”  
  
Keith takes it, holds it in his hands like it’s the most precious thing in the world.  
  
“Thank you,” he says, and puts it carefully in his pocket.  
  
“So now that you have that we can call each other,” Lance says, “and I’ll tell you about my day and you’ll tell me about yours and we’ll blow kisses through the screen and then I’ll ask what you’re wearing and you’ll be a dick about it and say that I can already see you or that you’re obviously wearing your blade suit or something like that and then I’ll pretend to get annoyed and we’ll blow more kisses through the screen to make up.”  
  
Keith can’t hold back a laugh. “You already have a whole conversation worked out?”  
  
“Yeah,” Lance says, as if it’s the most obvious fact. “I’ve thought about this a lot.”  
  
Keith’s heart skips a beat at the idea of Lance lying awake the way he had, of Lance thinking about dating him—shit, dating, they’re _dating_ , they’re _boyfriends_ now!—in the middle of an intergalactic war.  
  
Lance is watching him, his determination fading into uncertainty.  
  
“I mean if you don’t want to it’s fine,” he says, talking too fast. “There’s no pressure or anything, I just miss you a lot and I really like you and I want to be with you now instead of some vague future time when everything’s over but if you’d rather not date for real yet or put a label on this I totally understand—in fact”—he chuckles nervously, rubbing the back of his neck—“forget I said anything, it’s—mm.”  
  
He tries to look at the hand Keith puts over his mouth to silence him. It makes him go cross-eyed, which is silly and adorable at the same time.  
  
“I want to,” Keith says, and now Lance’s eyes are shining, and Keith can feel his smile under his palm, and he feels like his heart will burst. He removes his hand, but Lance catches his wrist, kisses his palm, the back of his hand, uses it to pull him closer so he can kiss Keith’s mouth again.  
  
This kiss is much shorter, more of a peck than anything else, but it leaves Keith just as breathless as the first. Lance leans his forehead on Keith’s, his eyes closed.  
  
“I don’t want you to leave,” he murmurs.  
  
“I’ll call you,” Keith promises. “I’ll do it as soon as I’m back in my room, if you want.”  
  
“I might crash Red out of happiness if you do that,” Lance says honestly, and Keith huffs a laugh. “So maybe not quite that fast, but—soon. We should call as much as we can.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Lance sighs, lifts his forehead off Keith’s. “You should probably go,” he says. “We’re really close to four vargas, if you don’t go in now Madat might have a heart attack.” He frowns. “Can Galra have heart attacks?”  
  
Keith shrugs. They let go of each other. Lance returns to the pilot’s seat, turns on the cloaking, and flies Red up to the base within a few seconds. Keith picks up Madat’s spare blade suit, double-checks that the tablet is safely tucked in his pocket, then awkwardly waves his free hand at Lance.  
  
“Well, um, bye,” he says.  
  
Lance gets up, as if he’s going to do something, but it seems at the last moment he decides not to, because he just waves too, as awkwardly as Keith had. It makes Keith feel better to know Lance doesn’t seem to know much more about this than he does. “Uh—yeah. Bye.”  
  
Keith nods, for no real reason. Red purrs— _bye, be safe, come soon_ —then opens his mouth to let Keith clamber out onto the platform outside the side door to the base. Keith climbs halfway out, going over their goodbyes in his mind; his heart had been so full, so satisfied, but it feels discontented now, longing and aching and bereft—  
  
His lips are still buzzing from the last kiss, but it’s fading, and he—  
  
—he has an idea—  
  
—so he climbs back in, hurries over to Lance, who is still hovering by his pilot’s chair, who is blinking at him with bewilderment, who is opening his mouth to ask what’s wrong—  
  
—and then Keith throws his free arm around Lance’s neck, pulls his head down, and kisses him, puts the minute experience of the past two kisses into this one, tries to make it as soft and deep and lasting as possible—  
  
—and Lance wraps his arms around him, pulls him in closer, and Keith is vaguely aware of the blade suit crushed between them, of Lance tilting his head, of him breathing _yeah, buddy_ against his lips, of his own smile throwing the kiss off kilter because it’s such a Lance thing to say, of Lance’s hand tipping Keith’s chin, moving it so their lips slot together more easily, and oh wow okay—  
  
“No!”  
  
Lance tears away from him with a gasp.  
  
“You have to leave!” he half shouts, pushing at Keith. Keith makes a sound of protest, tries to lean in again. “You only have a couple minutes—no, no, Keith—babe—oh my god—mm—no!” He dances away, out of Keith’s reach. “You have to go, babe, really—if you stay any longer I’m just gonna fucking kidnap you and take you back myself—”  
  
( _would that really be so bad_? says one part of Keith’s mind.)  
  
( _yes_ , says the angry, rational part, _yes, of course, what the fuck is wrong with you, just go, GO, you’re gonna get Madat in trouble_ —)  
  
The thought of Madat being punished for helping them jolts Keith out of his daze; he yells “OKAY I’M GOING BYE” at a still very flustered Lance, then turns and jumps out of the Red Lion and onto the platform.  
  
“Wait!”  
  
Keith turns. Lance is hanging halfway out of the lion, waving a hand at him. He’s clutching something in his fist; it looks like—folded up paper?  
  
“This is for you,” Lance says, then, all in one breath, “I wrote it a long time ago but I wasn’t sure if I should give it to you but I think I should so here it is please stay safe and don’t die okay bye!”  
  
He shoves it into Keith’s hand, then without waiting for a response disappears into the invisible lion. Keith blinks at empty space, hears Red rumble in the back of his mind— _silly boys, took you two long enough, next time I take nap while you kiss cause it’s boring_ —sends his thanks and love to him in response, feels the connection fade as the lion presumably flies away, until he can’t hear anything at all.  
  
He gazes out at the stars for a moment, clutching the spare blade suit to his chest and Lance’s note in his hand. He lets out a breath, long and slow, then smiles, turns to the side door, and sneaks back into the base.

.^.  
  
He makes it back inside without incident. When he’s safely in his room he puts the tablet in the drawer with his drawings of the paladins and the lions, sets Lance’s note on his pillow, and places Madat’s spare suit by the door so he’ll remember to give it to her next time he sees her. He makes a mental note to thank her too, and maybe take on a mission or two for her as well.  
  
He brushes his teeth and washes his face, looks at his reflection in the mirror, at his dopey smile and how bright his eyes are. He feels like he’s carrying light around inside him, something to keep him warm and loved in a place as cold and lonely as the base.  
  
He turns off the overhead light in his room and turns on the small emergency lamp by his bed. He sits on the bed, takes Lance’s folded-up note off the pillow, holds it in both hands and stares at it, his stomach flipping in anticipation.  
  
He doesn’t know what to expect. Is it a drawing? A letter? A recipe for Coran’s paladin lunch?  
  
( _If you would stop speculating and just fucking open it, you’d know_ , says the angry part of his mind, rolling its eyes.)  
  
He takes a deep breath and unfolds the note. It turns out to actually be three sheets of paper; the blank one is on the outside, to hide what the inner ones say. The inside ones are covered on both sides in thin loopy handwriting that is somehow exactly what he expects Lance’s writing to look like. It’s in black pen, some of the edges of the letters smudged where Lance might have run his hand over a word before it dried. Keith can picture him sitting at his desk, in the lounge, at the control deck, the side of his hand covered in black ink as he writes this.  
  
He takes another breath and starts to read.

  
Hi Mullet.  
  
(Keith snorts)  
  
I don’t know how to write this. I’ve never written a love letter before—  
  
(Keith’s heart stops)  
  
—so even though I’ve read some of the ones my papi wrote for my mami I don’t have any practice writing them myself. And it’s probably stupid to even write this at all cause I’m probably never going to give it to you and even if I did you’d probably not like it or think it’s weird. But maybe you would like it. When I woke up this morning you were already gone but I saw you’d left that drawing of me and maybe it’s just wishful thinking but that must mean you sort of like me, right? You wouldn’t draw a picture of someone you don’t like.  
  
At first I thought maybe I’d do one of those 5+1 type things, like the Naruto fics Hunk used to write in middle school—  
  
(Keith snorts again)  
  
—but that seems kinda complicated and I’d have to pick a specific number of things and I don’t want to do that (also don’t tell Hunk I told you that it’s his deepest darkest secret).  
  
So I’m just going to write and see what happens. I’m probably not going to give this to you anyway so it doesn’t matter if it’s weird.  
  
Okay here we go.

1\. I always see people talk about how they look into the eyes of the person they like and they feel like they’re drowning. And I think that’s dumb. Cause when I look into your eyes it’s not like drowning, it’s like doing a cannonball into a pool and you’re kinda nervous cause you know it’ll be a shock when you hit the water but you’ve done it so many times so you’re not scared cause you know it’ll be fine, that the water won’t hurt you or anything. But even though you know you still have that little shock, that ‘oh’ when you do it, and then it melts into that warm familiar feeling of being someplace you know really well.

2\. I don’t know when I started thinking of you as a friend or when I started liking you as more. It just sort of happened. It’s like when you talk to your friend and at first it’s dinnertime and then suddenly it’s midnight and you don’t even know where the time went or how it passed so fast but you know it was good cause you like talking to your friend. That’s what it’s like. I just realized one day that whenever I imagine introducing everyone to my family I always introduce you as my boyfriend.

3\. Sometimes I really want to hug you for no reason. Like when we were lying down last night. I really wanted to put my arms around you. And sometimes I feel really soft around you and I want to just lie down and hold you until we both fall asleep and then wake up with you snoring in my ear and hogging all the blankets. Hunk hogs the blankets when we share beds and it always annoys me but I think if you hogged them I wouldn’t mind at all.

4\. That time we were on Olkarion and you were trying to open that jar of Olkari pickles Ryner gave you and you couldn’t do it and you were pouting at the jar, I really wanted to open the jar for you but you were so insistent you could do it so I just watched. But I really want to do that again. I want to watch you struggle to open jars and then open it for you and then laugh when you get annoyed at how easy it was for me. I want to do a lot of stuff for you, like bring you your favorite food when you’re having a bad day and give you a hug when you feel lonely.  
  
This is almost two pages double sided so I’m going to stop for now but I guess what I’m trying to say is that I want to be the person you come to if you have good news cause you know I’ll be excited and if you have bad news cause you know I’ll stick with you and help you through it. I really really like you and I think it might be more than that but I’m afraid to actually write the bigger word right now so you’re going to have to be happy with the smaller one for now.  
  
So anyway I like you a lot and I miss you and I understand that you needed to leave but I wish you hadn’t and I want you to know that even though you’re not with us—with me—you still are in my heart and that won’t change no matter how long you’re gone. You might have left me but I haven’t left you and I’m not going to, not ever.  
  
—Lance

For a long moment Keith stares at the last two paragraphs, reads it over and over and over, reads _I think it might be more than that_ and _you still are in my heart_ and _I haven’t left you and I’m not going to, not ever_ , until he sees a droplet of water fall onto Lance’s name.  
  
He blinks, confused, then realizes with a jolt that he’s crying. He wipes at his face with his sleeve but the tears won’t stop; he sets the letter aside to protect it from any more teardrops, then covers his face with his hands and lets himself cry for a while. It’s an odd kind of crying, happy tears instead of sad, the product of being so deliriously happy after so many months of sustained sadness. Part of him wants to call Lance right away, to hear his voice and see his face after reading this even though he’d just been around him for so many hours, but he feels raw, and tender, and exhausted in a contented way, and he knows Lance must be tired too, must want to go straight back to the castle ship and sleep.  
  
So he takes out the tablet, pulls up Lance’s comm link and switches to text mode. He types out a shaky, _I read it_ , hesitates for a second, then adds _thank you_ and, with only a bit of a blush, _I wish I could hug you right now_.  
  
He’s finally stopped crying; he gets up to wash his face, then turns off the emergency lamp. As soon as it’s off he sees the tablet’s screen light up.  
  
_< 3 me too_  
  
Keith smiles, puts the tablet back in the drawer, clutches Lance’s letter in his fist and lies down.  
  
He doesn’t know when this will end, or how, or with whom. He doesn’t know when he will see Lance again, if it’ll be tomorrow or the day after or the next month or so far in the future that their next kiss will feel like their first again. He doesn’t know any of this, but he does know this: Lance loves him, and he loves Lance, and he will take any snatches of happiness he can find, no matter how small, like fireflies in the darkness of the war around them.  
  
He brings the letter to his lips, kisses these words Lance had written for him so long ago, these words that came from his hand and his heart. He folds up the letter with a smile, puts it in his pocket, then turns onto his side and falls asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! I’m writing another fic that’s part of the s5 au, hopefully posted in the next month or so. it’s set after this one but it’s a separate fic instead of a chapter added to this because its focus is much different; I wanted to have an entire fic for krolia and keith’s relationship instead of tacking it onto the second half of something else EDIT (28/05/2018) part 2 is now up if you want to read it, just click on the series link at the top!
> 
> also sorry for any typos I'm so tired of this lol if there's anything big enough to be confusing let me know and I'll fix it
> 
> voltron tumblr is laallomri, feel free to come talk!


End file.
